Growing up in Upper Marlboro, Md. — a small, mostly rural town a mere 25 to 30 minutes outside of Washington, D.C. — I often used the world’s largest museum complex as my cultural playground.
From afternoons passed throughout the decorated hallways of The National Portrait Gallery in Chinatown to summer camp trips at the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum’s Milky Way-like Einstein Planetarium, an admiration for all things historic and artistic has manifested in me throughout my coming of age. At the Planetarium, I remember sinking into my theater seat while gazing up at the artificial salt-and-peppery expanse suspended above me. Encased within those stars was future of all I had ever hoped to become. I glimpsed the destiny then. I held-steadfast to the hopeful, irrepressibly buoyant dream that invades the hearts of the young and feeds the elation of men.
As a newspaper journalist based on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, I now mesh memories of those jaunts across the National Mall with stories that bring the images on the walls and artifacts in the cases to life.
In 2011, I spent what proved to be the most transformative summer of my life at Princeton University, where I worked as a science writing, communications intern for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). The bulk of my work involved highlighting the accomplishments of the lab’s scientists, showing how their work benefits the larger community. My first GFDL story focused on the lab’s contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Nobel Peace Prize-winning international body of scientists that convenes every six years to deliver an assessment report on the state of the earth’s climate. I profiled and photographed visiting Hollings Scholar Arielle Alpert, an Earth and Planetary Sciences major at John Hopkins University, who worked on a hurricane research project with two of the lab’s mid-level scientists. I also worked closely with GFDL Communications Director Maria Setzer to complete a series of profiles called “Meet Our Scientists” – a set of biographies about the many climatologists, oceanographers, and physical scientists who keep the lab running.
I studied Mass Communications at the College of Notre Dame in Roland Park, Baltimore my freshman year of undergraduate school, where I made the dean’s list. After my father fell ill in 2001, I transferred to Bowie State University, where I graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree in English, concentration in Creative Writing in 2004. The summer following graduation, I accepted a communications internship with NOAA–an off-and-on partnership that would last seven years. From January 2005 to 2006, I dedicated a year of AmeriCorps service at the Volunteer Center for Anne Arundel County in Annapolis. The rest of that time was spent traveling (including a sojourn in CapeTown and Johannesburg, South Africa) and figuring out my next move.
Deciding to further my education in early 2007, I made the leap from creative writing to journalism by taking continuing education classes at Georgetown University and eventually earning a Master of Journalism degree in May 2011 from University of Maryland, College Park’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, an experience which proved as harrowing as it did helpful.
During my capstone semester at UMD, I covered the health beat for the university’s wire Capital News Service (CNS) headquartered at the National Press Club in the nation’s capital and became the only student that semester to be published in the Chicago Tribune (twice) and Los Angles Times online. My CNS articles were featured in several outlets. Aside from the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times online, I garnered bylines in Insurance and Financial Advisor, the Arizona Daily Sun, New York Daily News, AFRO, the Maryland Daily Record as well as radio station websites 1430 Annapolis, Maryland NPR affiliate WYPR, and WTOP.
I have also reported, researched, and freelanced for a handful of news outlets, most notably U.S. News & World Report, Howard University’s (No, I didn’t go there. People always ask me that.) The Hilltop, and Street Sense–a paper dedicated to Washington, D.C.’s homeless population. I currently edit four magazine supplements for The Easton Star Democrat — Chesapeake Brides, Chesapeake Healthy Lifestyles, Chesapeake HomeStyles, and Chesapeake 360. Through them, I provide editorial content from the Chesapeake region and Delmarva peninsula. Feel free to contact me at 301-455-0162 or jessicarharper@gmail.com.
This reporting portfolio includes a mix of audio slideshows, photography, creative writing, hard news dailies, long-form features, and video packages.
