About

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Journalist / Author

Mya Frazier is a journalist based in Ohio. Her work focuses on the power of the U.S. financial system in the lives of America’s low-income households. She is at work on a book for Knopf about the role of the credit reporting system in America’s inequality crisis. In 2025-2026, she was named the Jeffrey S. and Margaret Mais Padnos Fellow fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is also the program director at the Watchdog Writers Group at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, a non-profit journalism institute that produces books and in-depth reporting, while also acting as a teaching lab to train the next generation of reporters. 

Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, NewYorker.com, Bloomberg Green, Guardian Long Read, Harper’s, Switchyard, The New Republic, Outside, Columbia Journalism Review, and Columbus Monthly.  She is a former staff writer for Advertising Age, The Plain Dealer, and The Cincinnati Business Courier.

In 2025, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in feature writing from the American Society of Magazine Editors. Her work has been recognized by the Silvers Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council, where she has twice received the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. She has received journalism fellowships from Knight-Wallace at the University of Michigan, the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at CUNY, the Watchdog Writers Group at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and the 11th Hour Food and Farming Program established by Michael Pollan at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In 2022, she was named a fellow at The Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights at the Columbia Journalism School. 

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Awards

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Power Failure: On Landscape and Abandonment

  • Switchyard

Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards

Politics, Policy and Climate Action

“Across central Ohio, long home to farms integral to the American food system, fields of crops now vie for space with sprawling, electricity-hungry data centers. Here, investigative journalist and central Ohio native Mya Frazier offers a travelogue of sorts, in which she paints a vivid picture of middle America’s changing landscape, exposing as she goes many of the shadowy political and economic forces that ultimately undermine climate action. With bracing narrative style and prose that judges ‘gushed over,’ Frazier transports readers into her story’s scenes and effectively conveys the grim stakes of all this transformation for local communities and the planet alike. ‘Powerful, personal, and uniquely visceral, this was a cut above,’ judges said.”

Sunday Long Read Pick

Megan Grenwall

“A lyrical essay about data centers in rural Ohio is not a strong sales pitch, I get that. But Mya Frazier has pulled off something special, in a magazine I had never heard of until this week (a thrilling feeling!). She writes beautifully about two types of power: the kind sucked up by the data centers, and the kind that allows billionaires and governments to overrule locals.”

National Magazine Awards, Feature Writing

American Society of Magazine Editors

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The Eviction Experts: Can a City Stop an Eviction Crisis

  • Harper’s Magazine
  • Can a city stop a housing crisis?

American Society of Journalists and Authors

Writing Awards — Social Change

“Frazier’s reporting has produced a devastating portrait of eviction lawyers in Columbus, Ohio and shows how one-sided the eviction process has become across the country, putting tenants at risk of losing their homes. This piece combined a clear explanation of a complicated system with heartbreaking stories of people caught in its web.”
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When No Landlord Will Rent to You, Where Do You Go?

  • NYT Magazine
  • How extended-stay hotels and motels became the last housing option for thousands of low-income Americans.

National Press Foundation

Economic Justice Journalism Award

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Gas Companies Are Abandoning Their Wells, Leaving Them to Leak Methane Forever

  • Bloomberg Businessweek
  • Just one orphaned site in California could have emitted more than 30 tons of methane. There are millions more like it.

Sunday Long Read Pick

Nausicca Renner

“Mya Frazier is one of my favorite investigative reporters, and this story illustrates why the decline of the oil and gas industry will be slow and painful. The central example: wells are cheaper to keep open, spewing methane indefinitely, than to plug.”