A native Californian, Lisa Morehouse is an independent radio producer and print reporter covering arts, culture and education. She has filed stories for National Public Radio and other national and international outlets. For KQED’s Pacific Time, Morehouse filed pieces on Maori language revivals in New Zealand, and Lao refugees in rural Iowa. She’s most frequently heard on KQED Public Radio’s The California Report (played on over 30 stations state-wide) covering stories ranging from the impact of the state budget crisis on teachers to the declining numbers of African American farmers. Many of her stories showcase rural California communities, rarely covered on state or national shows.
Morehouse has featured innovative schools -- from rural Mississippi to island Maine -- for Edutopia, and wrote about teaching and reading and travelling for McSweeney's Quarterly. She wrote curriculum for the McSweeney’s series Voice of Witness, oral histories on humanitarian crises around the world.
A U.C. Berkeley graduate in English and Ethnic Studies, Morehouse dedicated fourteen years to public education in the nation's most high-needs schools. She taught middle school English in a mining town of 6,000 residents in rural Georgia. At age 24, she founded and led Teach For America’s Arizona region. She taught at San Francisco’s Balboa High School for a decade, engaging students in work around storytelling in both journalism and English classes. For many years, she taught students to collect oral histories about how their families immigrated and migrated to California; in 2005, in partnership with 826 Valencia, 120 oral histories were published as I Might Get Somewhere.
Morehouse has continually worked to ensure that unheard voices – of students, of farmers, of artists, of workers, of teachers -- have an audience.
