UMBC Graduate Wins National Award For Work At NPR
English major Vikki Valentine – a 1996 graduate of UMBC – was one of the team of National Public Radio editors to win a 2009 National Academy of Sciences Communications Award for excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering, and medicine.
Valentine (digital science editor), Alison Richards (deputy science editor), and Anne Gudenkauf (science editor) for NPR News' Climate Connections, were honored for a yearlong multimedia journey to explain the impacts of global climate change with well-reported stories from around the world (NPR News in partnership with National Geographic).
Valentine is the supervising science editor for NPR Digital News. She joined NPR in 2001, bringing multimedia storytelling to NPR's science desk. She works with photography, Flash, video, sound, text, animation and social media to help NPR create a signature space for its journalism in the digital world.
Valentine has a master's degree from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, and prior to NPR, worked as a science news editor at Discovery.com and features editor at BaltimoreSun.com. Her reporting has also appeared in The New York Times and in several documentaries for The Smithsonian Channel.
Previous awards for her work as lead web editor/producer for the year-long series Climate Connections include finalist for the 2008 National Academies Keck Futures Communications Award; 2007 White House News Photographers Association, Second Place; and the 2007 National Headliners Awards for Online Journalism, Second Place. Valentine, a board member of the National Association of Science Writers, was also a recipient of a Knight New Media Center/USC Annenberg Science Fellowship in 2007.
Labels: alumni
Alumnus Poet featured in Urbanite New Voices Issue
Kevin Krause, one of our 2009 graduate poets/English Majors was featured in the Urbanite's August New Voices: Emerging Writers Issue. His poem "Capra Pyrenaica, Pyrenaica" is illustated and prominently presented on page 49 and on www.urbanitebaltimore.com.
Labels: alumni
Keeping Track - Alumni News
Josh Abrams ('03, with English Honors) is in the English MA program at Kansas State University. He is in the Cultural Studies track, and hopes to complete a graduate certificate in Women's Studies as well. While he takes such courses as Old English and a mini-seminar on Walter Benjamin, he is also teaching Expository Writing.
Labels: alumni
English alumna in UMBC Magazine
The summer 2009 issue of UMBC Magazine includes a profile on Donna Lewis, a 1986 English graduate, who "leads a double life" practicing Law for the DHS and performing stand-up comedy.
http://www.umbc.edu/magazine/summer09/donnalewis.html
Labels: alumni
Alumni News
Aaron Ralby ('05) hopes to defend his dissertation at Cornell this fall: "Wyrd, Wisdom, and Warriors: Heroic Sapience in Medieval Germanic Epics." His work considers the representation of heroic wisdom in Old English, Old Norse, and Middle High German, taking Beowulf, Völsunga saga, and the Nibelungenlied as its primary examples. He spent the last year in Cambridge, where he began his graduate study.
He has also just written a children's book for the Hammond Undercover series published by Langenscheidt. Its title is "Hammond Undercover: Knights and Warriors," and it is a fact atlas, profiling knights and warriors from different ears and around the world. He is also working on a contribution to a forthcoming atlas on military history, and just recently launched a website business for editing and assisting with writing.
Labels: alumni
