The Team

Who We Are

Stephanie Fairyington

Founder

Stephanie Fairyington is a media professional with two decades of experience. A longtime journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post (online), The New Republic (online), The Atlantic (online), Time (online), Slate, Elle, Glamour and Marie Claire. She got her start in journalism as a fact-checker and has vetted copy for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Vogue (online), Seventeen, Dwell, Glamour, POZ, and iEEE Spectrum. She has overseen the fact-checking departments of Elle and Us Weekly as both magazines' former Research Chief. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Teacher-Trainers

Michael Montlack
Teacher-Trainer

Michael Montlack is author of two poetry collections and editor of the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). His poems recently appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, december, The Offing, Cincinnati Review, and Poet Lore. His prose has appeared in Huffington Post and Advocate.com.

As a writer in today's world, Montlack believes it's critical to help young minds parse fact from fiction so they can defend themselves against misinformation — and that's what he hopes to do as a SHF educator and trainer.

Lucile Scott

Teacher-Trainer

Lucile Scott is a writer and activist. Her first book, An American Covenant: A Story of Women, Mysticism and the Making of Modern America, was published in 2020. She has reported on national and international health and human rights issues for places including for the United Nations, VICE and POZ magazine. Her plays have been produced in New York City, Edinburgh and Los Angeles. In 2016, she hit the rails as part of Amtrak’s writer’s residency program to explore areas of American commonality. She believes a critical step to finding that commonality and creating a functioning democracy is teaching young people to think critically and parse fact from fiction.

Michael Quinones

Teacher-Trainer

Since graduating with a B.S. in journalism from Ohio University's E.W. Scripps school, Michael Quinones has enjoyed a 20-plus-year career in print magazines. In 2000, he nabbed his first non-intern job as copy editor and fact-checker at long defunct FamilyPC. Over the next dozen years, he worked his way up from copy editor to managing editor at Us Weekly, experiencing the brief meteoric rise of newsstand celebrity gossip before the financial collapse kick-started the decade-long death knell of print. Among other duties, he oversaw the copy and research departments and was proud that Usmagazine.com was one of the few digital outlets using fact-checkers—after all, they helped Us not get sued.

Recently, he has done copy/fact double duty (what we call "hybrid" work) for Vanity Fair and VF.com, where he is a full-time copy manager. Quinones has worked in quality control on everything from cookbooks to Snapchat app snaps, and currently side-hustles with Shopify as an editor.

He believes journalistic integrity, the search for the truth and the right ways to present it, is a social value and civic virtue that should be instilled at a very young age to build the future's informed citizenry.

Alexandra Hayes Robinson

Trainer-teacher

Alexandra Hayes Robinson is an editor, educator, and trainer at the School of Hard Facts. Prior to pursuing a career in content development in the technology and media industries, she was a middle school reading teacher in Canarsie, Brooklyn. During that time, Robinson was passionate about designing curriculum that taught her students to consume the news through a curious, critical lens, and how to decipher fact versus fiction in a sea of content and misinformation. In 2017, she won the Sue Lehmann Excellence in Teacher Leadership Award and earned her Masters in Arts of Teaching from Relay Graduate School in New York. She believes the foundation of our democracy and collective health rests on our ability to discern between facts and falsities.