EMILY SCHMALL ’05: WITNESS When the COVID-19 pandemic began, many foreign correspondents left their posts and went home. Emily Schmall ’05, however, chose to remain in New Delhi, where she worked as a journalist for the Associated Press (AP). “I decided that it was my ethical obligation to stay, that what I had signed up for in India was to be a witness,” she says. “And at that time, I was leading a team of local reporters, and they didn’t have the option to leave.” Such principles and respect for journalistic integrity have defined Schmall’s career since her days as a Bard undergraduate, when she received a formative piece of advice from a fellow student journalist. It was 2002, and Schmall had spent seven months reporting for the Bard Free Press in the wake of the September 11 attacks. By the end of her first year, Schmall was offered the position of editor in chief. “The editor at the time explained to me that when you’re a journalist, it’s who you are all of the time,” she recalls. “You can’t just protest on a Saturday and then on a Monday go back to being a reporter. You can’t have these dual identities. You’re always on. You’re always going to be this outsider, not quite involved in the things you’re covering, but there, present for them.” Schmall took his words seriously, thinking through what she wanted her place to be before deciding, as she remembers, “Yes, that is the role I want. I don’t need to be the activist. I don’t need to be the protagonist. I want to be the witness.” After spending a semester in New York City in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, Schmall returned to Annandale and received a Trustee Leader Scholar Program (TLS) fellowship in 2004. Her TLS project, conceived with Mariel Fiori ’05, became the Spanish-language publication La Voz, which still thrives and continues to be run by Fiori. Schmall grew up in DeKalb, Illinois, though she spent her summers in Brooklyn, New York, starting when her mother took a
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sabbatical from Northern Illinois University to teach at Brooklyn Law School. While on the East Coast, they visited relatives in Rhinebeck and the Hudson Valley— introducing Schmall to Bard at a young age. Though she has only childhood memories of her father, who passed away when she was 7, Schmall knew he was a journalist. He reported for the Newhouse News Service, UPI, and AP in the ’60s and ’70s, and when her mother gave her a book of her father’s news clippings, the writing’s relevance and style blew her away.
Schmall began her journalism career after graduation, working at the Miami Herald and Forbes. She earned a degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2009, and got a job offer from Bloomberg News to work out of Mexico City, though she soon decided to take a chance and go freelance. As opportunities arose, she took them: a year in Liberia working as the project manager of an NGO turned into a gig in Buenos Aires writing for the New York Times. She remained the witness throughout, using the tools she learned at Bard and Columbia to find her own voice and interests across a range of topics and environments. In 2014, after four and a half years as a freelancer, Schmall joined the AP as a staff writer. They offered her a correspondent
emilyschmallonline.blogspot.com
position in Fort Worth, Texas, where she won awards for her reportage on Hurricane Harvey, coverage of the Ebola epidemic, and as part of a team investigating schoolhouse sexual assaults. In 2018, the AP sent her to India, and after weathering the pandemic in New Delhi, she took a job as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. While in India, Schmall lost a friend, K., to suicide. She writes about the experience in her essay “My Friend Helped Me Carry My Burdens. His Proved Too Heavy,” published in the Times in December 2022. It is one of her only published stories written in the first person; it focuses on K., how they became friends and remained close through COVID lockdowns, and how his mental health struggles as a young Indian related to larger gender and cultural norms in the country. When speaking of her writing process, Schmall notes that she is at her best—feeling and thinking “most clearly and most viscerally”—through writing. After her friend’s tragedy, she used her blog as a space to process her grief and share some of the letters she had continued writing to him. “I’ve never experienced anything like that kind of response from any other piece of writing,” she says, describing the outpouring of messages from people around the world who felt seen by her story. “It made me feel like it had been worthwhile to mine my own grief and my own loss, because it made people feel slightly less alone in theirs.” Schmall had her first child earlier this year and is now back in Chicago. She recently coauthored a six-part series for the Times, India’s Daughters, that explores the gendered expectations young Indian women confront while pursuing their dreams for the future. With this work, Schmall returns to young Indians navigating the gender and cultural norms of their country, and continues her project of witnessing and connecting through writing. —Megan Brien ’19
lavoz.bard.edu
Photo by Smita Sharma