Stephanie Kuo is the co-host and producer of Racist Sandwich. She is an award-winning public radio journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. She currently works at PRX, helping make podcasts at public radio stations across the country. She was most recently a reporter at KERA, the NPR affiliate in North Texas, where she covered race, poverty and economic development. Her work has aired on national and regional programs, including NPR, WBUR’s Here & Now, Radiolab and the Texas Standard. She was also a food writer for Dallas-area media outlets, mostly begging people to stop eating “Asian Fusion.”
Stephanie received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Her hangover cure is a giant bowl of spaghetti and marinara.
Find her on Twitter @stephanieskuo.
Juan Diego Ramirez is the co-host and producer of Racist Sandwich. He is a multimedia producer and freelance journalist based in New York. He describes himself as a Mexican born, South Central Los Angeles raised DACA recipient. He has dedicated his free time aligning himself with organizations that help the betterment of undocumented students and families.
He is an avid skateboarder and has written about the subject for the online publication, Latino Rebels. Juan has interned for Oregon Public Broadcasting as a production assistant for OPB’s State of Wonder and OPB's Weekend Edition. He also has produced a short film along KBOO’s FA Radio host Pepe Moscoso.
He is team New York Style pizza, because is not hard to find $1 slice joints—or spots, if you are from the West Coast.
Find him on Twitter @juandr47.
Soleil Ho, co-founder of the podcast, is currently the restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. She has been working in the restaurant industry for more than a decade, having done everything from waiting tables to washing dishes to working as an executive chef. Somehow, she managed to pursue a career in nonfiction writing, publishing numerous literary essays and running Quaint, a semi-notorious feminist literary magazine.
She graduated from Grinnell College and thought getting an MFA from the University of New Orleans would be cool. She managed to attend the New York State Summer Writers Institute and sneak into AWP 2015 events before the siren song of burnt fingers and ticket printers pulled her back into the restaurant world.
Her more literary nonfiction has appeared in The Atlas Review, Interrupt Mag, Mason's Road, and Weird Sister. Most of her food writing and restaurant reviews can be found in BITCH Mag, Render: Feminist Food & Culture Quarterly, and the Heavy Table. Her chapbook of nonfiction essays, Hungry Ghosts, was published in 2016 by The Atlas Review.
And also when she was 6, she made a Teddy Grahams popsicle by freezing partially chewed crackers in a Dixie cup.
Find her on Twitter @hooleil or on Instagram @holeil.
Alan Montecillo is our founding producer and editor.
Zahir Janmohamed, co-founder, is an MFA student in fiction at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, Boston Review, Guernica, The Washington Post, The Economic Times, The Guardian, Scroll India, The Nation, and many other publications. His first article for The New York Times, "Butter Chicken in Ahmedabad," explored the politics of eating meat in India.
He has received fellowships and support from the MacDowell Colony, where he was the inaugural co-recipient of the Anne Cox Chambers fellowship for long-form journalism, as well as from the Mesa Refuge, the Djerassi Resident Arts Program, the Norman Mailer Center, the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and Bread Loaf. He is a 2017 Kundiman fellow, as well as a AiR New Voices Scholar.
He previously served in the US Congress, where he was a senior foreign policy aide to Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), and worked at Amnesty International, where he was the Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
He is a fan of lemon bars.
Follow him on Twitter @zahirj.