Texas Monthly is excited to announce the addition of two assistant editors over the past few weeks. Kristen Steenbeeke and Arman Badrei have joined the editorial staff as a copy editor and a fact checker, respectively, to aid in the production of Texas Monthly’s primary export: great stories about the great state of Texas.
Kristen Steenbeeke lived in Sugar Land as a kid but spent a large portion of her life in Washington state. There, she earned a BA in creative writing at the University of Washington. After attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and earning an MFA in poetry, Kristen returned to Texas—this time to Austin. She was most recently the managing editor at MissionWired, leading a team of editors to copyedit and do quality assurance for a wide range of nonprofit and political clients, while also freelance editing novels and nonfiction books. Kristen joined Texas Monthly as a copy editor on February 16.
Arman Badrei is not an unfamiliar face in the halls of TM. He started his career here in the summer of 2021, where he wrote about the opponents of critical race theory, as well as a piece about Run GenZ. Born and raised in Houston, Arman graduated from Princeton in May 2022 with a bachelor’s in politics and certificates in journalism and Spanish language and culture. Aside from his internship with Texas Monthly, Arman also interned at Houstonia magazine, in the office of Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher, and for the Deutser Management Consulting Firm, and most recently he had a fellowship at the Texas Observer. Arman began his full-time position as a fact checker at Texas Monthly on March 1, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome him back.
