Jonathan Kirkpatrick & Kastalia Medrano

Jonathan is a Filter tobacco harm reduction fellow. He’s incarcerated at Washington Corrections Center, where he’s a Teacher’s Assistant for re-entry workshops and trains peer educators in HIV and hepatitis C harm reduction. His writing has been published by the AppealTruthoutJewish Currents and the Seattle Journal of Social Justice. His Washington State Department of Corrections ID is #716850, and due to a 29-year-old paperwork error his name in Securus is “Jonathon.”

His fellowship is supported by an independently administered tobacco harm reduction scholarship from Knowledge-Action-Change, an organization that has separately provided restricted grants and donations to Filter.

Kastalia is Filter‘s deputy editor. She previously worked at half a dozen mainstream digital media outlets and would not recommend the drug coverage at any of them. She was also a syringe program peer worker in NYC, where she did outreach hep C testing and navigated participants through treatment.

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