Fernanda Santos is a Southwest Borderlands Initiative professor of practice at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism and the former Phoenix Bureau chief for the New York Times. Her first book, “The Fire Line: The Story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots,” received the Western Writers of America 2017 Spur Award for Best First Nonfiction Book. Santos got her start in journalism in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, her home country. She speaks four languages – English, Portuguese, Spanish and French – and has reported in three of them, in Latin America and the United States. Her coverage of demographic changes in New England’s first majority-minority city won a Sigma Delta Chi Award in Public Service by the Society of Professional Journalists.