As a queer woman of color raised by a single immigrant dad in Chicago, Kelsey has devoted her career to demystifying money and power for those with neither.

Based in Atlanta, Kelsey writes about business, economics, and the promise and peril of the elusive American Dream. She moved to the South from Brooklyn, N.Y. at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with her wife and two cats, Olive Oil and Cumin. Before that, Kelsey was a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, chronicling the changing nature of work & careers, higher education, and the unequal landscape of opportunity in the U.S. job market. She previously covered food & agriculture from the Journal’s Chicago bureau, focusing on the animals, farmers, and invisible workers who sustain the meat & dairy industries. And in the very beginning, Kelsey was an intern on the newspaper’s Real Estate & Housing desk in 2012.

Kelsey graduated from the University of Chicago, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in political theory and minor in gender & sexuality studies. On campus, she launched a quarterly sex magazine and served as Executive Editor of the South Side Weekly, a news magazine dedicated to the arts and culture of Chicago’s south side, distributed citywide. A Midwest native, her work has also appeared in the Chicago Reader.

Kelsey attended the public magnet school Illinois Mathematics & Science Academy, where she quickly discovered she wasn’t actually good at math or science. (Sorry, taxpayers!) Despite crushing her -- admittedly bizarre -- teen dream of becoming U.S. Food & Drug Administration Commissioner one day to fix America’s broken healthcare system, Kelsey credits IMSA for her boundless curiosity about germs, human behavior & the natural world as a journalist.