teaching Staff

MCYMP director Marcos Cabrera has been a professional journalist since the age of 18. He spent 12 years as a news reporter and features/ pop culture writer at the Monterey County Herald. His work has been published in the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, and the Village Voice. He was a staff reporter for the first Mosaic High School Journalism Workshop in 1993, and later served as program director.

Claudia Meléndez is an award winning journalist with more than 20 years of experience reporting in the United States and Mexico. In addition to her journalism experience, she founded a non-profit organization to encourage immigrant parents to become involved in their children’s education. As its executive director, she was in charge of grant-writing, grant-seeking and overseeing general operations. She’s also a board member of the Literacy Campaign for Monterey County, where she’s been a key driver of a major initiatives and produced publicity materials.

Mary Duan has been a journalist for more than 25 years, most recently as editor for six years of the Monterey County Weekly, where she led long investigations of government and community institutions during her tenure. The paper won the Free Speech and Open Government Award from the First Amendment Coalition and the James Madison Freedom of Information Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for its investigation of sexual abuse in the local Catholic diocese investigation, and numerous other awards, including Best Newspaper from the California Newspaper Publisher’s Association. During a brief break in her journalism career, Duan worked as a coordinator for a nonprofit which sought to bring adult men out of homelessness.

Julie Reynolds Martínez has been many things throughout her career: entrepreneur, artist, editor and investigative journalist. She has experience running retail and wholesale businesses and for more than a decade was co-owner and executive editor of the national bilingual Latino magazine El Andar from 1998 to 2003, helping the publication win 15 journalism and photography awards. For 10 years, she was a staff writer at The Monterey County Herald. Her writing and reporting have appeared on PBS, NPR, Discovery Channel, The Nation, Mother Jones, and in Latin America in La Jornada and El Puercoespín. Reynolds was previously a staff reporter for the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco. She received one of journalism’s greatest honors when she was selected as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, class of 2009.

Joe Livernois has been a community journalist in Monterey County since 1981, and is the former executive editor of the Monterey County Herald. He has developed significant experience in nonprofit management and fund development as a former executive for a nonprofit literacy agency and as the longtime board president of a mental-health services agency.

Marcos Damián León is a writer and teacher from the Salinas Valley. They are an alumni of both Vassar College and the Voices of Our Nations (VONA) writing workshop. Their work has been published in Hispanecdotes, the Good Men Project, and is forthcoming in Under the Gum Tree.