Kendal Blust’s Biography
Kendal Blust is a senior field correspondent with NPR member station KJZZ’s Fronteras Desk at the station’s bureau in Hermosillo, Sonora. She covers a wide range of stories from northern Mexico including cross-border business and trade, immigration, education, women's movements and the environment. She recently won awards for her reporting on the collapsing sewage system in a Sonoran coastal town, rising violence in the state and families struggling to adapt to the challenges of distance learning amid the pandemic. She was also part of the Fronteras Desk team that won regional and national Murrow awards in 2020 for “Tracing the Migrant Journey,” an ambitious, transnational reporting project that traced the experiences of migrants from Honduras, through Guatemala and Mexico and into the United States.
Before joining KJZZ, Kendal worked for the Nogales International, an award-winning community newspaper on the Arizona-Sonora border, where she covered stories on border and immigration issues, local government, education, business and anything else that came her way.
She received an MA in journalism from the University of Arizona School of Journalism.