David L. Stern  previously covered the former Soviet Union and the Black Sea region for GlobalPost. A journalist for more than 18 years, Stern started out as a television news producer in Moscow, covering, among a multitude of other stories, two attempted coups, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the transition to a market economy, war in Chechnya and Russia’s first democratic presidential elections as an independent country in 1996. In 1998 he made the jump to print journalism and moved to Baku, Azerbaijan, first to work as the Caucasus correspondent for Agence France-Presse, and then as Caucasus and Central Asia correspondent for the Financial Times. In 2003 he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. Since 2007, Stern has worked with the New York Times in Central Asia, writing about the oil economy in Kazakhstan, fortune tellers in Tajikistan and the murder of an independent journalist in Kyrgyzstan. He resides in Kiev, Ukraine, where he is a freelance correspondent.