Staff & Contact

Susan Thorson

Student Managing Editor 

Susan Thorson was the student Managing Editor for Harlem View through December 2023. She has always loved reading and writing compelling words and is excited to bring her passion for communication to this student publication.

It was a dream come true when she and her husband moved to NYC in 2015, as she has always had a love for cities and feels her dad’s childhood in Queens somehow placed NYC in her blood and in her heart. After raising four kids, she is thrilled to have the opportunity to go back to school at City College. She FINALLY completed her undergrad in 2021 and is now pursuing an MFA in creative writing. Susan loves flea markets, thrift stores, cozy outdoor dining spots, connecting with family and friends and looking and listening for the stories we all have.

Jennifer Garcia

Student Assistant Managing Editor

Jennifer Garcia is the student Assistant Managing Editor for Harlem View. She is a first-generation undergraduate at The City College of New York pursuing a major in business management and a minor in journalism. She is a two-time NBCU Academy Fellow where she has gotten the opportunity to intern with CNBC en Español as a production intern and is currently interning with NBC Sports as an Olympics research intern. As the student Assistant Managing Editor, Jennifer helps edit and publish student pieces.

Jennifer is Mexican-American, born and raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where she saw firsthand the socio-economic disparities of New York City. She is passionate about social issues and sharing minority voices through journalism. She enjoys writing, reading, and photography. On a regular day, you can find her exploring the city listening for new stories to share.

Barbara Nevins Taylor

Distinguished Lecturer, Journalism Program Director & Advisor to HarlemView

Barbara Nevins Taylor teaches Introduction to Journalism and TV Reporting and advises students.

Her investigative reporting at TV stations in New York, Atlanta, Kentucky and Alabama earned 22 Emmy Awards and more than 50 journalism awards and honors. Nevins Taylor graduated from The City College (1970) and loves sharing what she learned as a journalist with students.

During her TV career, Nevins Taylor pursued stories that made a difference in the lives of individuals and the community. Her reports earned praise, generated government action and helped send wrongdoers to prison. Long before the most recent financial crisis, Barbara exposed flaws in the mortgage lending and banking systems that led poor people into financial ruin.

On ConsumerMojo.com, which she founded in 2012, Nevins Taylor uses the latest digital storytelling techniques to serve a growing audience that needs reliable information about complicated issues.

Nevins Taylor has contributed to The New York Times Op-Ed page, writing about criminal justice, foster care and young people in New York City. Her writing has also focused on concerns of parents and women and has appeared in national magazines. Her book Beautiful Skin of Color, with doctors Jeanine Downie and Fran Cook-Bolden, published by ReganBooks, evolved from her television reports.

CCNY Alumni awarded her the prestigious Townsend Harris medal for career achievement and she is also in the Communications Alumni Group’s Hall of Fame. She wants her students to get there, too.

Linda Villarosa

Journalism Professor And Website Founder

Linda Villarosa founded HarlemFocus, which became Harlem View. She is the former journalism program director, a valued journalism professor, a journalist-in-residence at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. Her most recent story in 2020, “Pollution is Killing Black Americans. This Community Fought Back,” links decades of environmental pollution and neglect to deadly health conditions of Black Americans. She also wrote, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death-Crisis?” It ran on the cover of the Magazine in April 2018. It examines the effects of race, racism and health-care inequality on infant and maternal mortality and was nominated for a National Magazine Award.

Her cover story “America’s Hidden HIV Epidemic,” about HIV/AIDS among black gay and bisexual men in the South, ran in June 2017. That article was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award and was honored by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists’ Association for excellence in journalism.

Formerly, Linda was the health editor of The New York Times and executive editor of Essence Magazine. She has written dozens of articles for the Times, including three award-winning stories published on the newspaper’s front page. In Essence, her article “Coming Out,” written with her mother, remains one of the most responded-to in the history of the magazine, and her 2013 profile of New York City’s first lady Chirlane McCray was picked up by 50 other media outlets. Her Essence story “Pride & Prejudice,” about LGBTQ activism in Africa, was nominated for a 2016 GLAAD Media Award.

Linda is the chair of the board of the Feminist Press and has written or co-written a number of books. She is the author of “Body & Soul: The Black Women’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being,” and her novel “Passing for Black” was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. She is working on a new book, “Under the Skin: Race, Inequality and the Health of a Nation,” to be published by Doubleday.

A graduate of the University of Colorado and the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, Linda spent a year at the Harvard School of Public Health as a journalism fellow.

Karen Loew

Helped Create HarlemView.

Karen Loew is a journalist and urbanist in New York City. While teaching journalism classes to undergraduates at City College of CUNY, she and the CCNY Journalism Program brought HarlemView to life. She was the Associate Editor at The Forward and the Editor-in-Chief at CityLimits.org. Her writing and reporting have been published in Citylab, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Next City and elsewhere.

Rich Prior

Website Creator

Designer Rich Prior and his team (City College Alumni, BFA in Electronic Design and Multimedia) created the Harlem View site and launched it in Spring 2019.