Alysia Steele is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi and an affiliated Isom fellow. She teaches photojournalism, multimedia, podcasting, and oral history best practices. Currently, a Ph.D. Candidate in the UM History Department, her dissertation centers on Elaine Tomlin, the first black female staff photographer for the SCLC. Activist Gloria Steinem endorsed Steele's book, Delta Jewels: In Search of My Grandmother’s Wisdom, which comprised her formal portraits and oral histories of elder Black church women in the Mississippi Delta. Her work has been published in the NYT, NBC.com, Chicago Sun-Times, NPR, and USA Today, to name a few. In 2016, she won the Mississippi Humanities Council’s “Preserver of Mississippi Culture” award for Delta Jewels. Steele was part of the Dallas Morning News staff that won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News for their Hurricane Katrina coverage.