Journalist / Writer

Minerva Canto

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Experienced, bilingual beat reporter skilled at writing analysis, feature, and long form news stories.

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Minerva Canto is a longtime journalist whose work explores the places where politics, policies and people converge. She is equally adept at poring through files of data as she is hiking knee-deep in the snow to the site of a plane crash or interviewing a murder suspect face-to-face.

As a journalist based in Southern California, she frequently writes about social and political issues, ranging from sentencing in juvenile justice to challenges faced by foster youth in accessing higher education. A native of Mexico City, she speaks fluent Spanish and is a former staff writer for The Associated Press and was a daily newspaper reporter, covering beats that included immigration, politics, arts, crime, and courts. Her experience also includes reporting throughout Mexico, including analysis and coverage of a presidential campaign, a year-long project on violence against women in Ciudad Juárez, and stories about cross-border issues. Her most recent experience includes writing news editorials for the Los Angeles Times and a reported news column about health inequities for the independent Los Angeles-based Capital & Main.

Minerva has a MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Creative Writing program. She writes fiction and non-fiction inspired in part by her experiences as a cross-border reporter and an immigrant growing up in Santa Ana, California. She is working on a memoir, “Geography of Longing: A Nomadic Journalist in Search of Home.”

Photos: Peter Phun