Scott Winter

I teach writing and reporting at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn., where we focus on all forms of storytelling, including social justice stories at home and abroad. I like swinging out in tennis, eating Vietnamese food with my family and writing stories that matter. I also wrote a book called Nebrasketball, a biography of coach Tim Miles, after I followed his team for a year. I finished my Ph.D at University of Nebraska in 2018.

Textura •

Built on Hope | A Textura Documentary

In January 2025, three Bethel University students and their India reporting partners spent a few weeks in a brick factory in Haryana, India. They wanted to show the economics and desperation of migrant families who live where they work. What they found was three mothers who made or moved bricks all day and ran their homes all night with little help from their husbands. Manisha traveled from Rajasthan for this work. Paramjeet from Punjab. And Kushbu from Bihar. Her 9-year-old daughter, Nazia, takes care of the house and her five siblings all day. Her future will look like her mother’s unless the economics and political systems change. Her future is built on her mother’s hope. Coming in Fall 2025.
Textura 2022 •

Border of Dreams | A Textura Documentary

Two families tried to cross the Mexico-U.S. border. One made it. One didn’t. Mardoqueo wanted his family to have its own home. Its own land. But he felt forced to split up his young family and cross into America to achieve security and happiness. He tried once and didn’t make it. He feels compelled to try again despite his wife’s objections. Abel had to make that same choice in Mexico. But he made it. He brought his wife and daughters with him. He achieved a prosperity he sought, but he still dreams of crossing the border again. Back home.
Minnesota Reformer •

Creator of 'The Wire' talks to the Reformer about troubled police departments — like MPD

David Simon hates the war on drugs. But he doesn’t hate all police. He takes issue with police militarization, but he doesn’t have time for slogans. In fact, he’ll cuss out anything from “ACAB” on the left to “Back the Blue” on the right. For him, the solutions to problematic law enforcement, even here in Minneapolis, are more complex than slogan-chanting political action, but not impossible. A longtime Baltimore Sun crime reporter-turned-author, screenwriter and TV producer, Simon is most...
Columbia Journalism Review •

'In Kosovo, everybody has their own truth'

Arbana Xharra, 17, remembers reaching the border, where Serbian military officers took her family’s identification documents. On the Albanian side, international reporters pushed microphones in front of her to ask what genocide looked like. “Killing people on the streets, I see,” she said in one Associated Press clip that survives on YouTube. “I see them in the streets, killing. I see three people and one little child.” That’s when her journalism dreams began.
University of Nebraska Press (book) •

Nebrasketball: Coach Tim Miles and a Big Ten Team on the Rise

Nebrasketball provides a full-access account of Tim Miles’s path to Nebraska and his team’s inaugural season in the $186 million Pinnacle Bank Arena. With full access to Miles and the team, Scott Winter provides basketball fans with an intimate look at a rising star in college basketball, detailing what it’s like to coach an NCAA men’s program today with all of its triumphs and struggles, along with Miles’s larger story as a transformational coach who has made Nebraska basketball, and other college programs, relevant. The book also shows the small-town legacy and tenacity that created Miles, including his mother’s prodding, his benching as a college player, and his significant history of losing, which he claims was his most important mentor.