IN PHOTOS: Communities around the Metro tune into the ‘Beautiful Game’

Sophia is the founder of 285 South, Metro Atlanta’s only English language news publication dedicated to the region’s immigrant and refugee communities. Before launching 285 South in 2021, she worked for over 15 years in media and communications, including at Al Jazeera Media Network, CNN, the United Nations Development Programme, and South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT).

Her writing has been published in Atlanta Magazine, Canopy Atlanta, the Atlanta Civic Circle, the Atlanta History Center, and The Local Palate. She won the Atlanta Press Club award for Narrative Nonfiction in 2023 and 2024; and was a recipient of the Raksha Community Change award in 2023 and was a fellow of Ohio University’s Kiplinger Public Affairs Journalism Program in 2024.

Contact her at sophia@285south.com and learn more about her here.

Gabriela Henriquez Stoikow is a bilingual journalist based in Atlanta, Georgia, covering local news, immigration, and healthcare.

She has previously worked at The Miami Herald, CNN, and Miami Today News, and her work has been featured at the Atlanta Business Chronicle, WABE, Rough Draft, and Documented NY. In Venezuela, she worked at the investigative journalism outlets RunRun.es and Armando.info, covering politics, human rights, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Gabriela won the Atlanta Press Club’s Rising Star Award in 2025.

Fiza Pirani immigrated to the United States from Saudi Arabia with her family in the mid-90s. Though she was born in India — and is still hoping to revisit her birthplace one day — Atlanta has been home for more than two decades. Fiza was previously a staff writer at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she earned a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism and founded Foreign Bodies, an award-winning mental health newsletter centering immigrants and next-gens. Her freelance work has been published in 285 South, Teen Vogue, The Guardian, and Electric Literature, among other publications. In 2026, she won the Atlanta Press Club Award of Excellence in Entertainment Journalism. Fiza is currently at work on a memoir-in-progress.