Alumni News Archives: Fall 2003
Richard Lee Colvin ’01, formerly an education writer with The Los Angeles Times, has been named the new director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and Media at Teachers’ College in New York. The institute organizes seminars for journalists that feature policymakers and researchers speaking on timely issues in education. Colvin said his priorities include expanding the institute’s involvement with broadcast journalists, helping journalists handle the often conflicting and confusing claims of education research, and continuing to assist journalists in their coverage of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Nadine Epstein ’90 recently became managing editor of Moment, a magazine of Jewish politics, culture and religion, based in Washington, D.C. She has a new book coming out this fall, with Rosita Arvigo, titled Spiritual Bathing: Rituals and Traditions from Around the World, from Celestial Arts.
During his fellowship year, Scott Huler ’03, a Raleigh-based freelance writer and producer, won several awards. From Public Radio News Directors Incorporated, he received a second place citation, division B, for a “soft feature” on “electric football” (he received a similar award from PRNDI in 2002). From the Tennessee AP/Broadcasters Association, he received an award for news excellence and writing, and another for sound excellence. “While working my ass off for 20 years I won exactly zero awards. Then I got the Michigan Fellowship,” he says. “About a month after getting the Fellowship I was awarded the 2002 PRNDI award, and while on the Fellowship I won three more things. Thus, the less I work the more awards. I believe if I stop working entirely they will award me the Pulitzer Prize. Just how do you suppose I should take that?”
Michael Knisley ’98 has moved from Colorado to Connecticut to become senior editor at ESPN.com. “That’s where ESPN’s dot-com concentrates its attempts at humor, satire, and off-the-wall looks at the world of sports,” Knisley says. “It’s where ESPN comes closest to marrying sports to popular culture, so the job opens up a whole set of new horizons and challenges for me.”
Fellows Tom Stanton and Tim Wendel, ’96, were both touring with new books when their paths crossed in late July at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. They each gave presentations the same day at the museum’s atrium. Stanton’s new book is The Road to Cooperstown: A Father, Two Sons and the Journey of a Lifetime (Thomas Dunne Books), while Wendel’s latest is The New Face of Baseball: The 100-Year Rise and Triumph of Latinos in America’s Favorite Sport (Rayo).
After defeating three primary candidates, Tom Grant ’98 lost his bid to become mayor of Spokane, Wash., taking 47 per cent of the vote to Jim West's 53 percent. Saying he would be the voice of everyday people, Grant announced his campaign in a column in The Local Planet, where he had been editor since 2001. Over his 22 years of journalism, Grant said he “helped a dozen or so innocent people get out from behind bars. I helped put one murderer in prison. And I like to think I've stood up for the powerless and the afflicted, even though it wasnt always the politically correct thing to do.”
