Sandhya Dirks
Reporter/ProducerSandhya got her start as a reporting fellow at KALW, working on award winning radio documentaries about crime and justice and education in Oakland. She reported on the 2012 presidential election in Iowa, for Iowa Public Radio, where she also covered diversity and mental health issues.
As a politics reporter in San Diego at KPBS, she helped lead an investigation into sexual harassment charges against the mayor that resulted in his resignation. For that reporting she was named, along with her team, San Diego's Journalist of the Year by the local Society of Professional Journalists. Sandhya also reports for NPR, Latino USA, and PRI's The World.
She returned to KALW to continue her work on criminal justice, poverty, and the changing community of the Bay Area.
Sandhya studied at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, where her masters project, an investigative documentary film about international adoption, received the Pasty Pulitzer Fellowship.
She lives in Oakland with her two cats.
-
The importance of what actually transpires at a city council meeting can get hidden behind seemingly boring procedure – the shuffling of papers and the…
-
For the past eight years, one weekend in late summer brings first responders from across the country and around the world -- firemen, medics, SWAT teams…
-
From the outside, Richardson Bay in tony Sausalito looks like a manicured sea of floating million dollar homes, bobbing up and down in orderly rows. But…
-
Current Pope Francis has famously said about homosexuality, “who am I to Judge?” But despite his progressive words, the Roman Catholic church does not…
-
John Lewis is a congressman from Georgia, a pillar of the civil rights movement and an author. Lewis is getting ready to release March, the new graphic novel of his life.
-
On Friday, embattled Mayor Bob Filner officially steps down. Allegations of sexual harassment against Filner have rocked the eighth-largest American city. Now, San Diegans face a potentially contentious special election in November.
-
If and when immigration reform passes in Washington, thousands of immigrants are going to need trained immigration lawyers. But advocates say there's a dearth of them even now, leaving a void for untrained or unscrupulous attorneys to mislead clients seeking to navigate the system.
-
Both campaigns want to claim momentum heading into the final days of the campaign. This is especially true in battleground states like Iowa, where enthusiasm and voter turnout can make all the difference. Momentum is a common political metaphor, but what does it really tell us?
-
In Iowa, it takes just 100 signatures to petition for a temporary "satellite" voting station. Campaigns are establishing the pop-up sites at grocery stores and college campuses to encourage early voting at convenient times and locations.
-
The Midwest is home to the largest collection of grottoes, or man-made caves, in the world. And the mother of them all — encrusted in $6 million worth of semiprecious stones — is in West Bend, Iowa, the life's work of a priest after he survived pneumonia. It turns 100 this weekend.