Robin Kemp

Robin Kemp is a freelance writer, photographer, and videographer. She has worked for CNN and The Weather Channel and taught college English and adult ESL. She created a data system for The Weather Channel that allows live show producers to estimate hourly customer power outages in storm areas. She also contributed to many award-winning breaking news events at CNN while completing her undergraduate degree at Georgia State University during Desert Shield, Desert Storm, the fall of Eastern Europe, and the Balkan Conflict. Robin likes to pick up new technologies, especially in data journalism, and she leverages her training in English and history while researching complex stories. She is a largely self-taught photographer, videographer, and platform-agnostic video editor, with additional multimedia journalism training from Poynter Institute and continuing education in AVID and Premiere Pro from UGA's Grady College. As a reporter at Gambit in New Orleans, Robin covered City Hall, the environment, small business, historic preservation, and arts and culture. She won the Brown Pelican Award for her coverage of Louisiana's coastal erosion. Robin sees a story as a puzzle to solve and reporting as a daily educational field trip. Robin also has extensive academic training in poetry and creative nonfiction. She is the author of This Pagan Heaven and Brave Walking, and her work appears in several literary anthologies, academic reference guides, and literary magazines. While working on her Ph.D., Robin studied abroad in Cuba and is an avid and ardent student of all things Cuban. She also is a longtime advocate for childcare, workplace diversity, and LGBTQ equality, having served as an activist in New Orleans in the 1980s, founding TurnOut, the Turner Broadcasting LGBTQ employee group, in the 1990s, and co-producing a segment of CNN's in-house diversity training video, Through The Lens. In the days following Hurricane Katrina, Robin served dual roles with the American Red Cross and the Amateur Radio Emergency Service, helping to restore communications in central and coastal Mississippi, and coordinated a national book drive for writers and artists who lost their libraries in the flooding. Robin cooks like a Cajun, dives like a dolphin, and works like a warrior.

Dogs, cats, SCUBA, swimming, sailing, canoeing, kayaking, saltwater fishing, camping, climbing, gardening, birdwatching, wildlife photography, coding, videography, Spanish, travel, art, music, politics, old-school newsies, home improvement, poetry, poetics, literature, writing, New Orleans history, Southern history, cameras, typewriters, adventure travel, target shooting, hybrid cars, documentaries.