Business Insider / Carmen Cusido

Carmen Cusido

Carmen Cusido has worked for MikeWorldWide Public Relations, the New Jersey Department of Education, Twitter, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and others.

During her time on the editorial team at Twitter Moments, she taught journalism at Kean and Rutgers universities and Hudson County Community College. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Oprah Daily, Refinery29, Remezcla, NBC News, CNN, NPR, Cosmopolitan, New Jersey Monthly, NRDC, and other publications.

Cusido also has written about U.S-Cuba relations and her recovery from anorexia and has been interviewed by ABC News, The Guardian, The Star-Ledger, amNewYork, and Univision. Her book, "Coping with Eating Disorders," geared toward a young-adult audience, was published in January 2019. She was also featured in Jean Chatzky's 2019 book titled "Women with Money."

In addition to her full-time job and freelance writing, Cusido co-teaches a bilingual journalism course at Montclair State University in New Jersey, and has taught communications and journalism courses at Kean and Rutgers universities and Hudson County Community College.

Cusido earned a Master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in Journalism with minors in Spanish and political science from Rutgers University. Additionally, Cusido participated in the Yale Writers' Workshop in 2018 and earned an executive education certificate through Harvard Business School in 2021.

I'm a first-generation grad student who went to an Ivy League school. I couldn't measure up to some of my rich classmates.

Most of my peers were jet-lagged, but I was too excited to sleep. My Columbia University journalism school classmates and I were on a 10-day trip to Ireland for our "Covering Religion" class. We would soon meet and interview people of all faiths, spending time at churches, synagogues, mosques, and a Buddhist retreat. We'd speak to Sikhs, Protestants, Catholics, Hare Krishnas, and even the then-president of Ireland, Mary McAleese. While my upper-middle-class peers had traveled to Europe and acr...

Business Insider • 1st November 2022

When I was 13 I was admitted to an eating-disorder facility. I ended up with a nasogastric tube and a 4,600-calories-a-day diet.

Until I was admitted to an eating-disorder facility in suburban New Jersey at age 13, I had seldomly met white people my age. I usually saw white people in positions of authority, like the Catholic nuns or teachers at my parochial schools or my dentist. But when my weight dipped to a dangerous 60 pounds — down from 110 in a year — and I was hospitalized, I realized how different I was from kids my age. Many of my Latina peers in my working-class town of Union City, New Jersey, dismissed my anor...