Contacts

Camillia Lanham has been the editor of the Sun and New Times since 2015. She started her journalism career in Montana after earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Montana School of Journalism. She reported for the Hungry Horse News in Columbia Falls, Montana, and the Big Fork Eagle in Big Fork, Montana, before moving to the Central Coast to work as a staff writer for the Sun in 2013. Camillia earned a master’s degree in public policy from Cal Poly in 2020 and has won awards from both state and national organizations for government, enterprise, environmental, and agricultural reporting. She teaches journalism ethics at Cal Poly and is a true believer in local journalism’s ability to empower communities to participate in democracy and advocate for themselves. Her free time is spent outdoors, where she loves to camp, hike, and backpack or in the kitchen, where she loves to cook.

Andrea Rooks is passionate about advocating for both reader and writer, upholding the rules of grammar and punctuation while listening to the voice of the writer as they tell important stories to the local community. She got her love for journalism as an editor of her high school paper in Santa Rosa and later graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. Shortly after graduation, Andrea started her career at the Santa Maria Sun, New Times’ newborn sister paper, and over the next six years she worked as a staff writer, news editor, and the editor. She left the newsroom to raise her two daughters but continued freelance writing and editing, and in 2014 she returned to New Times and the Sun as the proofreader. In 2019, she became associate editor. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University in 2018. When not writing and editing, Andrea enjoys walking and hiking around the Central Coast, wine tasting with her husband, taking her teenage daughters to coffee, reading, crafting, and volunteering with her church.

Born and raised in Santa Maria, award-winning journalist Caleb Wiseblood grew up reading the Sun—especially for its movie reviews—long before he landed a writing internship at the paper in 2016. As the Sun’s Senior Staff Writer, he covers local news, nonprofits, and businesses across Northern Santa Barbara County. His previous writing work includes features in Coyote + Oak, a Central Coast-based arts and lifestyle magazine. He graduated from Cal Poly with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 2015. Outside of work hours, you might catch Caleb walking his chihuahua, grabbing a Neapolitan shake, browsing through Captain Nemo’s comic book aisles, or bowling.