Erica Bryant

Erica Bryant is the associate director of writing in Vera's communications and external affairs department, where she aims to use the written word to drive change in the criminal legal and immigration systems.

Before joining Vera, Erica spent 16 years as a reporter, columnist, and editorial board member at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, her hometown newspaper. Her work revealed how broken systems—immigration, education, and criminal justice—impact the vulnerable. She wrote extensively about the profound injustice of pretrial detention, including an investigation that revealed that a man suffering with severe mental illness was being held pretrial in solitary confinement at Attica Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison. Her immigration work showed the cruel treatment of undocumented dairy workers, the pain of family separation in the wake of deportation, and the senselessness of an immigration policy that forces people to risk their lives to provide badly needed labor.

She holds bachelor’s degrees in English and French literature from Boston University.