Mountain State Spotlight

Ken Ward Jr. is a distinguished reporting fellow with nonprofit newsroom ProPublica. Ken spent nearly three decades reporting for The Charleston Gazette on the impacts of coal mining, chemical manufacturing and natural gas drilling on his home state of West Virginia. In 2018, he received a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called Genius Grant) for “revealing the human and environmental toll of natural resource extraction in West Virginia and spurring greater accountability among public and private stakeholders.” He grew up in Mineral County and graduated from West Virginia University.

Sara Crickenberger, a native West Virginian, has spent decades running nonprofits in West Virginia. Most recently, she was the Foundation Relations and Institutional Grants Officer at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine. She previously led Lewisburg’s Carnegie Hall and for a decade was President and CEO of the American Lung Association of West Virginia. Crickenberger began her professional career working for newspapers in Martinsburg, Beckley and Charleston. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Marshall University and a master’s in communication studies from West Virginia University.