Jeanne Carstensen
Jeanne Carstensen is a San Francisco-based writer and editor.
Jeanne Carstensen is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. In 2015, she covered the mass arrival of refugees to Lesbos and other eastern Aegean islands and the smuggling operation in Turkey. In 2016, she returned to Greece to report on the 60,000 refugees trapped in the country after the Balkan route closed. She also reported from Germany, France and Hungary where she covered refugee integration. Her work on the refugee crisis is supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and has appeared in Foreign Policy, PRI’s The World, The Nation, The Intercept, GlobalPost and other publications.
Jeanne was executive managing editor of The Bay Citizen, which produced the Bay Area pages of The New York Times. She has been an editor at Salon, SFGate.com and the Whole Earth Review and a producer at Radio for Peace International, a shortwave station in Costa Rica, where she lived for six years. She was a National Arts Journalism fellow at Columbia University and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Nautilus, Salon, Religion Dispatches, Al Jazeera America and other outlets.
This small French city wants to be a good home for refugees
Saint-Nazaire is famous for its shipyards. But the small city on the coast of Brittany in western France is also becoming known for something else — the welcome it gives to refugees.
This Yazidi family escaped genocide in Iraq. Their next challenge is building a life in France.
A small German city finds it's not easy welcoming hundreds of Syrian refugees
After fleeing Palmyra, this Syrian family is trying to find home in small-town Germany
'How will I live there?' Asylum seekers in Hungary are detained in shipping containers.
Three Somali journalists on Lesbos hope for the best — asylum in Europe
Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis make up the majority of the refugee population stuck on Lesbos and other Greek islands. So the Africans there to seek asylum are often overlooked.
Syrian refugees are now paying smugglers to take them back
The EU’s asylum policies are failing. And conditions in Greece are so bad that many desperate Syrians see no other option but to make the dangerous journey back home.
Refugees lose the little they have left in Lesbos detention center blaze
The EU-Turkey deal has turned Lesbos into an open-air prison.
For Yazidis in Greece, safety and security are still out of reach
Persecuted by ISIS, chased out of Iraq, the Yazidis have suffered a lot. And that was before they got to Greece, where other refugees, mostly Muslims, are still persecuting them.
Muslim refugees stuck in Greece miss home more than ever during Ramadan
The Greek government is making an effort to support Muslim refugees during Ramadan but for those stuck in limbo in tough conditions the holiday is also a painful reminder of better days.
The fortune-telling baker who predicted a camp's end
Makmoud Nakarch, a law student from Aleppo, had created a Syrian flatbread-baking business at a massive refugee camp in northern Greece. He also said he could predict things. He predicted, correctly, that this camp would be emptied.
Idomeni refugee camp may be emptying, but trauma of crisis is far from over
About 8,500 refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere lived in the Idomeni camp in northern Greece. Authorities began clearing it on Tuesday.
Trapped in Greece, these refugees wait, just before another frontier
Chicken scratches on the wall mark the number of days one Syrian has spent in a camp that is home to 10,000 of the 54,000 refugees in Greece.
For long-suffering refugees, a three-star respite
It's been a long journey, one that skirted death at least once. So Ali Jaffari at first thought it was a scam when a Greek friend offered his family of four a room at a three-star hotel in Athens.
One reason undocumented immigrants didn't learn about Flint's lead poisoning sooner: There wasn't much in Spanish
The nearly 1,000 undocumented residents in Flint, Michigan have been among the last to learn about the dangers of lead in the water. One reason? Language barriers.