Bio

Pequeño is a national columnist whose work has most recently appeared in USA TODAY. Prior to her time with the paper, her work appeared weekly in the Raleigh News & Observer, the Durham Herald-Sun and the Charlotte Observer, where she covered politics, extremism, identity and culture as a member of the North Carolina Editorial Board. In 2022, her work for the paper won her second place in the “lighter columns” category at the North Carolina Press Association Awards.

She got her professional start at INDY Week, a 40-year-old alt-weekly based in Durham. In 2022, she won the Duke University/Green-Rossiter Award for Distinguished Newspaper Work in Higher Education Reporting for her coverage of journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’s struggle with the UNC-CH Board of Trustees the year prior. She later contributed to the INDY through the paper’s “Voices” section.

She first developed her writing voice at The Tab, a now-defunct college blogging website, but joined The Daily Tar Heel staff in 2017. That same year, she interned with Our State Magazine, the second-largest regional magazine in the United States. In 2019, she took a class trip to Medellín, Colombia to report on the Venezuelan migrant crisis. Uprooted, an award-winning documentary series, was the result.

She graduated from the University of North Carolina in 2019 with degrees in journalism and political science.

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