Erin Coulehan is an investigative reporter at KTSM 9 News.
Coulehan is born and raised in El Paso, and is a third generation journalist and social justice advocate. Topics of interest include the intersection of politics with culture, immigration, and science. Coulehan spent the first ten years of her career covering music, television, film, and pop culture for national publications before coming home to focus on local news and El Paso’s role in national headlines.
Intellectual interests and what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “the pursuit of a scholarly life” drive Coulehan in all of her writing endeavors. She holds degrees in Journalism and Literature from UTEP and Georgetown University at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Coulehan’s first professional byline was at Washington Life Magazine, a luxury lifestyle magazine, while interning as part of the Bill Archer Fellowship Program. She later decided to return to D.C. for Journalism and Rock and Roll.
While at Georgetown University, Coulehan interned at National Geographic Television and Slate by day and cut her teeth as a Rock and Roll reporter for a local live music website the rest of the time. In 2013 Coulehan was hired as a news writer for Rolling Stone where she covered breaking news, interviewed artists, and covered music festivals and awards shows.
Coulehan returned to El Paso after earning a Masters in Journalism from Georgetown to begin a second Masters program in English and American Literature at UTEP. During that time, she also freelanced for magazines that include ELLE, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Teen Vogue while developing her voice as a critic for Salon.com.
While at UTEP, Coulehan’s research focused on Shakespeare and music, as well as Holocaust Studies. Coulehan spent two winters in Europe where she retraced the Nazi path from Berlin to the Final Solution, meeting with survivors and researching at the Auchwitz Museum and Memoria along the wayl.
In 2018, Coulehan was invited to the bordertown of Bayonne, France to present a case study on music, migrant students in El Paso and Hip Hop as one of three Americans invited to a prestigious ethnomusicology conference.
Her thesis was on the relationship of Shakespeare, Hip Hop, and Childish Gambino’s “This is America.”
She released her first book, The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice, which she co-edited and wrote a chapter on deconstructing social hierarchies in 2020.
Coulehan joined KTSM 9 News in 2020, two weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world, and continues to be committed to delivering thoughtful and breaking news to the community despite the new normal.
In addition to KTSM 9 News, Coulehan is a stringer for The New York Times where she covers border issues that include the Cielo Vista Walmart Shooting, El Paso’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
