Ashley Powers is a freelance journalist in Washington, D.C., and a former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Her recent feature for The California Sunday Magazine, about a family that moved to a town run by followers of polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs, won a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

At the Times, she served as Las Vegas bureau chief and wrote about child sex trafficking, homelessness, and the collapse of the middle class during the Great Recession. She also covered politics and breaking news, including mass shootings in Tucson, Arizona, and Aurora, Colorado, and penned features on showgirls, wedding chapels, legal brothels, and a memorial service for a side-of-the-highway shoe tree. In Los Angeles, she was part of a team that dug through thousands of documents to show how the nation's largest archdiocese mishandled priests accused of abusing children.

Her work has also been honored by the Society for Features Journalism, the Religion Newswriters Association, Best of the West, and the Los Angeles Press Club and cited in "The Best American Sports Writing." She was a fellow at Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma and Loyola Law School's Journalist Law School and a recipient of the Wesleyan Writers Conference's scholarship for journalists.