Cloe Axelson is the senior editor of WBUR’s opinion page, Cognoscenti.

Cloe first came to WBUR in 2015, as a contributor — her very first piece for Cog was an essay about women’s soccer. Two years later, in 2017, she joined Cog’s staff as an editor. Since then, she’s worked with hundreds of writers, produced dozens of pieces for radio, and written about everything from pelvic floor therapy, to politics, to the Red Sox.

Nobody would say Cloe took the obvious path to a career in journalism. As with most voyages, however, she likes to believe the best one “is a zig zag lines of 100 tacks.” Prior to WBUR, she worked as a grassroots organizer on political campaigns in Missouri, as the assistant to a best-selling author in New York City, in the public affairs office at MassDEP (where she wrote speeches and learned an unusual amount about stormwater management) and on the communications team at the Democratic National Committee. She also worked as a consultant for Partners In Health, for several national nonprofit organizations, including the state PIRGs and City Year, and taught college-level writing at Boston University, where she earned her masters degree.

The first foray into opinion writing Cloe can recall occurred in college, when she engaged in a heated, days-long debate with a fellow student — via letter-to-the-editor — in The Tufts Daily. (She can’t remember now what the argument was about, but it did spark a life-long love of writing letters-to-the-editor; done properly, she thinks there may be no better use of 150 words.) Cloe earned a degree in political science at Tufts and played varsity softball for four years. Her arm is shot now — torn rotator cuff — but she still likes to moonlight with the WBUR softball team.

Cloe and her husband have three daughters and a dog, Fern, named for the character in “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White. She’s an aspiring surfer (emphasis on aspiring), a not-so-fast-anymore runner and a dedicated cold dipper (she goes into Walden Pond year round). There are teetering piles of books on her nightstand and her desk at all times — nonfiction, poetry, novels, essays — and she loves the challenge of audio storytelling, which to her feels like thinking in 4D. She lives with her family in the Boston suburbs.