Leah Donnella
Leah Donnella is an editor on NPR's Code Switch team, where she helps produce and edit for the Code Switch podcast, blog, and newsletter. She created the "Ask Code Switch" series, where members of the team respond to listener questions about how race, identity, and culture come up in everyday life.
Donnella originally came to NPR in September 2015 as an intern for Code Switch. Prior to that, she was a summer intern at WHYY's Public Media Commons, where she helped teach high school students the ins and outs of journalism and film-making. She spent a lot of time out in the hot Philly sun tracking down unsuspecting tourists for on-the-street interviews. She also worked at the University of Pennsylvania in the department of College Houses and Academic Resources.
Donnella graduated from Pomona College with a Bachelor of Arts in Africana Studies.
-
With Kamala Harris entering the presidential race, we look back at what has shaped her personally and politically —from being the self-described "top cop" of California, to taking on a former president with dozens of felony convictions. -
As Kamala Harris nears the Democratic party’s nomination, the mood around her candidacy seems less breathless than in 2008. Code Switch digs into what a Black president would mean this time. -
For decades now, drag queens have captured the national imagination. Drag kings, on the other hand, have been relegated to a less prominent position in pop culture. But today on the show, we're telling the story of one Elsie Saldaña — aka El Daña. As someone who started performing in drag in 1965, she's now considered one of the oldest drag kings still performing in the U.S. Over the course of her long performance career, many forces have converged that could have stopped her from taking to the stage. But today, almost 60 years after her debut, she hasn't stopped yet. -
Every summer B.A. Parker returns to Creswell, North Carolina, where her family still has a farm. But she's mostly avoided actually going to the nearby site where her ancestors were enslaved. This week, we revisit the second of two episodes, where Parker and her mom decide to go back to the plantation. -
Given all the heavy news swirling around these past few weeks, we wanted to try to bring the temperature down a little. So here it is: drinks to help you cool down. -
In part one of two episodes, B.A. Parker meets people who, like her, are grappling with how to honor their enslaved ancestors. She asks herself: what kind of descendant does she want to be? -
This week we're bringing you the first episode in a new series called Inheriting, created in collaboration with our friends at LAist Studios. In each episode, NPR's Emily Kwong sits down with Asian American and Pacific Islander families and explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. -
At the height of the racial reckoning, a school district in Virginia voted to rename two schools that had been previously named for Confederate generals. This month, that decision was reversed. -
Jerry Seinfeld has the become the latest in a string of public figures to blame "political correctness" for the death of comedy (among other societal ills). But what does the term actually refer to? -
This week on the podcast, we're revisiting a conversation we had with Chin about her book, Mott Street. Through decades of painstaking research, the fifth-generation New Yorker discovered the stories of how her ancestors bore and resisted the weight of the Chinese Exclusion laws in the U.S. – and how the legacy of that history still affects her family today.
