Meet the Flytrap Founders

Andrea Grimes

pronouns: she/her
website: homewiththearmadillo.blog
socials: @andreagrimes on Bluesky and Instagram, @_andreagrimes on TikTok

Andrea Grimes is a journalist and activist living in Austin, Texas. By day, she leads the opposition research team at Reproaction and by evening-on-the-patio, she writes about Texas, politics, and reproductive justice on her newsletter, Home With The Armadillo. Her work — primarily media criticism, abortion rights reporting, and political analyses — has been published in the New York Times, The Nation, MSNBC, the Texas Observer, Rewire News, DAME, Ms., Jezebel, Bitch, The Baffler, and a host of other publications. She holds a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Texas and dreams of someday publishing a book on the wild and weird history of her favorite cocktail, the Bloody Mary.

Aria Velasquez

pronouns: she/her
socials, etc: Instagram, Bluesky 

Aria Velasquez is a writer originally from the Atlanta suburbs and currently based in Chicago. She has worked in many newsrooms in past lives, including Slate, DCist (RIP) and THE CITY. Velasquez’s work has also been featured in the Uproot Project and Bklyner. She graduated from the University of Georgia in 2014 with bachelor’s degrees in political science and international affairs but (thankfully!) talked herself out of going to law school. Instead she went into journalism and well… here we are. Velasquez is a member of the Writers Guild of America East, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Association of Independents in Radio. She has never won a journalism award, but she dreams of hitting the Mega Millions jackpot so that she can spend unholy amounts of money on foreign language audiobooks to improve her Spanish listening comprehension. If you want to lure her into conversation, start talking about reality TV shows set in Atlanta, local government corruption/your favorite political scandal or textile art.

Chrissy Stroop

pronouns: she/her
website: bugbeardispatch.com 
socials: chrissystroop on Threads, BlueSky

A senior correspondent for Religion Dispatches and a former columnist for openDemocracy, Chrissy Stroop has a PhD in modern Russian history from Stanford and brings an academic’s eye to cultural analysis. Drawing on her experiences growing up evangelical and her Russian area studies expertise, Stroop often writes about the intersections between Christianity and right-wing politics, both locally and globally. As both a writer and a public speaker, she also advocates for secular government and pluralist coexistence. Having lived all over the place from Indiana to Florida to Moscow (Russia), Stroop now happily resides near Portland, Oregon.

Christine Grimaldi

pronouns: she/her
website: linktr.ee/chgrimaldi
socials: @chgrimaldi and @yourombudsmom on all social media platforms

Christine Grimaldi is a Washington, D.C.-based literary nonfiction writer, abortion journalist, and podcast host. She’s writing a memoir based on “The Shadow and The Ghost,” her highly regarded Atavist Magazine longform narrative unraveling her family’s secret—her grandmother’s childhood in an interwar Brooklyn, storefront Italian Pentecostal church with cultish devotion to its leader, “Reverend Mother." Christine’s feature stories, cultural commentaries, and personal-meets-political essays have appeared in The Toast, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Counter, among other outlets. Since 2016, Christine has covered and developed expertise in abortion policy and politics while unfailingly centering people who have abortions over policy and politics. Her abortion coverage can be found in SELF Magazine, VICE, Vogue, GEN Magazine, and The Texas Observer. Christine recently joined her longtime friend Katelyn Burns as co-host of the hit "Cancel Me, Daddy" podcast, a Flytrap Media production. In her segment as "Your Ombudsmom" and at @YourOmbudsmom on all social media platforms, Christine holds the media—"me" included—accountable. Connect with Christine at @chgrimaldi on all social media platforms, starting with Bluesky.

Evette Dionne

pronouns: she/her
website: evettedionne.com
socials: @freeblackgirl across all platforms

Evette Dionne is a culture journalist, critic, and editor who serves as the executive editor at YES! Magazine and a columnist for MSNBC. Dionne also writes extensively about the intersections of race, gender, and size, for a number of print and digital publications, including HBO, The Cut, Andscape, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Time, The New York Times, Zora, The Guardian, Teen Vogue, SELF, and Harper’s Bazaar. She’s also written book chapters in The Problematic Tyler Perry, The Beyoncé Effect, Can We All Be Feminists?, The (Other) F-Word, Burn It Down, and Sex and the Single Woman.

Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box, her middle-grade nonfiction book, was nominated for a National Book Award and won a Coretta Scott King Honor author. Her debut collection of essays, Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul, was released by Ecco in 2022.

Katelyn Burns

pronouns: she/her
socials: @transscribe on Twitter and Bluesky

Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist and columnist for MSNBC and Xtra Magazine. She co-founded and co-hosts the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast, covering internet culture and how we use social media. She was previously the first ever openly trans Capitol Hill reporter in US history. She covered the 2020 presidential election for Vox and has bylines at The Washington Post, Politico Magazine, Jezebel, Bitch, Rewire, Playboy, and VICE. She thinks the automobile is the worst invention in human history.

Nicole Froio

pronouns: she/her
website: www.nicolefroio.com
socials: @nicolefroio on Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, and Bluesky

Nicole Froio is a Brazilian-Colombian journalist and feminist cultural critic. She writes social justice-centered reporting for Prism Reports, Dame Magazine, and Yes! Magazine, and opines on pop culture from a Latine perspective for Refinery29's Somos Latinos. Her career spans over a decade and her bylines can be seen in The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, The Verge, Bitch Media, and many other publications. She believes the written word can help us engage critically with the complex and injust capitalist landscape we live in. 

Rommy Torrico

pronouns: they/them
website: rommytorrico.com
socials: instagram

Rommy Torrico is a formerly undocumented, queer, trans nonbinary visual artist born in Iquique, Chile and raised in Florida. They have been involved in social movement spaces encompassing (im)migrant, queer, and trans rights struggles for over a decade and infuse much of their work with personal experience and the stories their communities share. Over the years, Torrico’s work has been included in several publications and exhibited at the Getty Museum, the Smithsonian Museum, the Library of Congress, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, as well as many galleries and museums throughout the Americas and internationally.

s.e. smith

pronouns: none
website: realsesmith.com
socials: instagram.com/realsesmith, sesmith.bsky.social

s.e. smith is a Northern California-based journalist, essayist, and editor with a social justice focus. smith's work on disability, culture, and social attitudes has appeared in publications such as the Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Vice, in addition to numerous anthologies, most recently Disability Intimacy (Vintage, 2024). smith received a National Magazine Award in 2020 for work in Catapult Magazine.

Tina Vásquez 

pronouns: she/her
socials: Twitter, Bluesky

Tina Vásquez is a movement journalist with more than 15 years of experience reporting on immigration, reproductive injustice, food, labor, and Latino culture. Currently, she is the features editor at the nonprofit newsroom Prism, where last year her 18-month investigation into abuse in the H-2A program with Futuro Investigates and Latino USA won the Journalism Collaboration of the Year Award from the Institute for Nonprofit News. In 2021, she was the recipient of a McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism and in 2020, she was named Type Investigations’ Ida B. Wells Southern Fellow. Tina serves on the board of Press On, a Southern journalism collective that strengthens and expands the practice of journalism in service of liberation. She was born and raised in Southeast Los Angeles and currently calls North Carolina home.