Nashville Public Radio Staff

Rachel Iacovone (YAH-kuh-VOAN-ee) is the morning host for Nashville Public Radio.

Rachel began her public radio career covering politics in Florida during the 2016 presidential race. Rachel was outside as the eye of Hurricane Irma passed over Southwest Florida and on air for WGCU, the same station she listened to as a kid as Hurricane Wilma tore the roof off her childhood home.

Rachel is a Florida Gulf Coast University alumna (wings up!) and an avid AP Style enforcer. When she’s not hosting or reporting, Rachel can be found cooking and posting her creations to social media, all while watching true crime shows.

Blake Farmer is Nashville Public Radio's senior health care reporter. In a partnership with Kaiser Health News and NPR, Blake covers health in Tennessee and the health care industry in the Nashville area for local and national audiences.

Blake has worked at WPLN throughout his career, most recently serving as news director and primary editor for the newsroom. Previously, his reporting focused on education and the military. He's also enjoyed producing stories about midnight frog gigging and churches holding gun raffles.

Growing up in East Nashville, Blake attended Lipscomb Academy. He went to college in Texas at Abilene Christian University where he cut his teeth in radio at KACU-FM. Before joining WPLN full time in 2007, Blake also wrote for the Nashville City Paper and filed international stories for World Christian Broadcasting.

Meribah Knight is a journalist who relocated to Nashville from Chicago, where she covered business, the economy, housing, crime and transportation. She is the host of The Promise podcast.

Most recently she was a staff reporter with Crain’s Chicago Business covering manufacturing in the Rust Belt, aviation and transportation. Prior to Crain’s she was a staff reporter with the Chicago News Cooperative, producing the Chicago section of The New York Times. There she covered a wide range of topics from arts & culture to education to poverty. She was an adjunct lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Her writing has appeared The New York Times, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, Utne Reader, American Craft, Chicago Magazine, Crain’s Chicago Business and The Chicago Reader. Her radio and multimedia work has been featured on WBEZ, The PBS News Hour and Chicago Public Television.

A native of Cambridge, Mass., Meribah has a Masters of Journalism from Northwestern University and a BA from New York University. She lives in Donelson with her husband, a photojournalist with the Tennessean, and their four cats.

Samantha Max covers criminal justice for WPLN as a Report for America corps member. This is her second year with Report for America: She spent her first year in Macon, Ga., covering health and inequity for The Telegraph and macon.com.

Previously, she was an investigative reporting intern for the Medill Justice Project and a bilingual multimedia news intern at Hoy, Chicago Tribune’s Spanish-language daily. She returned to her hometown of Baltimore in 2015 and again in 2016 to work as a newsroom intern for NPR-affiliate WYPR.

Sam Zern is a journalist currently located in Nashville, where she is also a senior at Vanderbilt University. She is currently WPLN’s podcast intern. Originally from Austin, Texas, Sam’s reporting background includes covering education, business, and Vanderbilt University news.