Crystal L. Paul is the State Editor with the Illinois Answers Project. Her decade of experience includes enterprise, news, and communities reporting for various publications in Chicago, including an award-winning report on the missing basketball courts in Beverly. She previously served as Interim Features Editor with The Seattle Times, where she launched and edited the A1 Revisited Accountability project to re-examine issues in historical coverage at the legacy newspaper and co-created the Communities beat to center coverage on the issues important to under-covered and marginalized communities in Seattle. In her time at The Seattle Times, she earned awards for her coverage of the Native community's canoe journey tradition which had not been covered for 50 years, a history of tipped workers in the Northwest, and the region's little-known connections to the "buffalo soldiers." She has a degree in behavioral neuroscience from Yale University.