Kate Carlisle ’83
Kate Carlisle is the managing editor of The Washington Post News Service with Bloomberg News. She manages a staff of eight editors at The Washington Post, where her most recent project was overseeing the new wire service partnership with Bloomberg LP. Carlisle has also written occasional features for The Post, where she started as a copy editor in 1986. Earlier, she was a reporter for Thomson Newspapers, where she covered Congress and federal agencies, and a reporter and editor for United Press International. Carlisle volunteered in the photo history division of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, where she contributed to a catalog for the Japanese tour of an exhibit. She has mentored college and high school journalists and last year taught at the University of Missouri Urban Journalism Workshop. Her Smith degree is in government.

Susan Jansen ’79
Susan Jansen joined Nomura Securities International in October 2009 as managing director and head of credit research. Previously, she served as managing director and global head of high-yield and distressed research at Lehman Brothers, where she managed an award-winning team of sixty analysts across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Jansen also served as a member of the group responsible for approving risk commitments on debt financings and was a senior fixed-income research analyst. Jansen serves several nonprofit institutions in various executive and advisory capacities, including Smith College, the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and The League of Women Voters of Rye, Rye Brook, and Port Chester. Her Smith degree is in economics and she holds an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Rye, NY, with her husband and two daughters.

Linda Kramer Jenning ’72  
Linda Kramer Jenning is the Washington editor for Glamour and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. She began her journalism career with the Associated Press in New York, San Francisco, and Oregon. She later joined People magazine and served as acting bureau chief and deputy bureau chief in Washington, DC. She earned her master’s degree in literary nonfiction from Johns Hopkins University and teaches courses in feature writing and the journalism of conscience at Georgetown. She was the 2006 Shapiro Fellow in the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University. Journalism honors include awards for Glamour’s political coverage from the National Women’s Political Caucus and from the Planned Parenthood Federation, Time Inc.’s 2007 Henry Luce Award for Outstanding Story for her People article on a wounded marine, and a Henry Luce Award for Deadline Reporting for leading People’s coverage of the 2006 Sago, WVa., mining disaster. As a director of the Alumnae Association of Smith College, she serves as the liaison to the Smith Alumnae Quarterly. She also serves on the board of Running Start (www.runningstartonline.org), a nonprofit dedicated to inspiring young women to run for political office. She is a member of the media advisory board of the National Network to End Domestic Violence and the speakers committee of the National Press Club. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband.

John MacMillan
John MacMillan is director of alumnae communications and editor of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly. He oversees communications to alumnae from the Alumnae Association and the Office of Development. He has worked at Smith for fifteen years, having started as assistant editor of the Quarterly. Interestingly, he was the first man ever hired by the Alumnae Association. Previously, MacMillan was an editor and reporter at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, and a crime and city government reporter for the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram. He is extremely proud to lead the Quarterly in its 100th year.

Lindsey Roberts ’06  
Lindsey Rowe Roberts is a freelance writer, editor, and blogger about interior design, architecture and historic preservation, among other topics. She is currently a contributing writer for Apartment Therapy (ApartmentTherapy.com/DC) and editorial assistant with Preservation magazine, in Washington, DC, the magazine for The National Trust for Historic Preservation. Roberts has been published in The Washington Post, Seattle magazine, Seattle Bride, Seattle Weekly, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Smith Alumnae Quarterly, and, of course, The Sophian. She also wrote the introduction to Body + Being: How We Age, by Stephanie J. Cooper (C Design and Publishing, 2007). Prior to a freelance writing career, she was managing editor for Seattle Homes & Lifestyles magazine, where she started the magazine’s blog, Design Dish. She graduated from Smith with a degree in English language and literature and a minor in biological sciences.

Martin Antonetti
Martin Antonetti is the curator of rare books in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, where he also teaches courses in the history of the book and in contemporary artists’ books for the Smith College art department. Antonetti has written and lectured on many aspects of these fields, including fine printing, the evolution of letterforms, bookbinding, and book collecting. Before coming to Smith, he was librarian and director of the Grolier Club in New York City, the country’s premiere organization for bibliophiles. Antonetti is also on the faculties of the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School and the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He currently serves as vice president for publications on the board of the American Printing History Association. He received his library degree from Columbia University in New York, where he specialized in rare books and special collections librarianship.

Diana Burrell ’88  
Diana Burrell is a freelance journalist who writes about parenting, health, food, and nutrition for a number of magazines and newspapers, including the Boston Globe, Parenting, Clean Eating, and Psychology Today, among others. Her nonfiction books include The Renegade Writer: A Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success (Marion Street), The Renegade Writer’s Query Letters That Rock (Marion Street), and The Secrets of Successful Weight Loss (Alpha/Penguin). Burrell is currently working on a parenting memoir.

John Connolly
John Connolly is the Five College 40th-Anniversary Professor of Philosophy at Smith College and director of the ethics program. He specializes in ancient and medieval conceptions of the good life and is interested in using those conceptions to assess modern business ethics. In recent years, he has been instrumental in bringing a greater focus on applied ethics to the Smith philosophy department and has published essays and books on both medieval and modern philosophy. Connolly has taught at Smith since 1973. From 1992 to 2002, he served in the college administration, including as dean of faculty, as Smith’s first provost, and as acting president (2001–02). For his accomplishments in these posts he was given the college’s John M. Greene Award at Commencement in 2002. Connolly is a 1965 graduate (summa cum laude) of Fordham College. He received a BA (MA) from Oxford University in 1967, and a PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1971. He is married to an interfaith minister and has two daughters, both of whom graduated from Smith.

Jan Friedman Constantine ’70
Jan Friedman Constantine serves as general counsel for The Authors Guild, a nonprofit organization representing more than 8,000 published authors and freelancers. She has more than thirty years of experience in general corporate law and litigation, with specific expertise in intellectual property, trade regulation, and labor and employment law. Most recently, she has been responsible for overseeing The Authors Guild, et al v. Google, Inc., a class action lawsuit, filed in September 2005. Previously, Constantine was executive vice president of News Corporation, a media conglomerate housing Twentieth Century Fox Films, Fox News, Fox Television, the New York Post, and Harper Collins to name only a few of News’ many global media properties. Prior to that, she was deputy general counsel for Macmillan, Inc. She is a partner of Constantine Cannon, a boutique law firm specializing in antitrust law. She is currently an adjunct professor at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and, in 2001–02, she taught a course on ethics and journalism at Baruch College’s Graduate School in Journalism. Constantine is a graduate of George Washington University’s National Law Center. She serves on the board of directors of the Feminist Press, which was founded by Florence Rosenfeld Howe ’51.

Andrea Cooper ’83
Andrea Cooper is a freelance journalist and essay writer, whose topics include psychology, social issues, health, travel, food, true-life narratives, and more. Her wide-ranging credits include Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Parade, National Geographic News, Salon, Saveur, Details, Utne Reader, Entrepreneur, Ms., and More. She has written for many women’s and parenting magazines, including Elle and Redbook. Her commentaries have aired nationally on NPR’s All Things Considered and been published on NPR.org. She also contributes to specialty publications, including Oxford American, Brain/Child, and Neurology Now, and to literary journals, such as Puerto del Sol and The Fourth Genre. Cooper has received the Maggie Award from Planned Parenthood, the Outstanding Article award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Federation of Press Women award for editorial/opinion. Before opening her writing business, Cooper worked for WFAE, the NPR station in Charlotte, NC. She graduated cum laude from Smith in American studies.

Cheryl Coward ’91
Cheryl Coward is a writer and multimedia artist based in Texas. Formerly the chief of research at the Village Voice, her written work spans fiction, plays, nonfiction essays, magazine articles, and news reporting. She has written extensively about technology and was a panel member on the SXSW/Interactive panel “Where are the Black Tech Bloggers” in 2008. She is a co-founding member of Stamp Lab, a performance group. Stamp Lab received the 2008 Artspark Festival Theater prize for HUSH, for which she was a co-writer, videographer, and technical designer. Stamp Lab also received the Fronterafest 2009 “Best of Fest” award for the multimedia play T.A.G., for which she was a co-writer, video producer, and technical director. Her first novel was Sugarhill, and she is currently finishing a collection of short stories. She is also an expert on women’s basketball and owns the popular women’s basketball Web site Hoopfeed.com. She majored in philosophy and minored in economics at Smith. She is online at cherylcoward.com.

Judith Glassman Daniels ’60
Judith Glassman Daniels enjoyed a thirty-five-year career as a magazine editor in New York City, acquiring along the way a specialty in developing new magazines and repositioning old ones. Career stops included New York Magazine Company (New York and The Village Voice); Savvy, a pioneering women’s business and lifestyle magazine, which she founded and edited; Time Inc. (Life); and Condé Nast (Glamour and Self). She taught at the journalism schools of New York University and Columbia. She is a co-founder and past president of the Women’s Media Group in New York. Daniels has been an adviser to the Smith Alumnae Quarterly for many years. Five years ago she moved to midcoast Maine, where she has been entirely unsuccessful in keeping volunteer commitments to a minimum.

Ann Downer-Hazell ’82
Ann Downer is the author of five fantasy novels, beginning with The Spellkey (1987) and most recently The Dragon of Never-Was (2006). Her 2003 novel, Hatching Magic, was a Scholastic Book Club selection and has been translated into Catalan, Russian, Thai, and Romanian, among other languages. She also wrote two nonfiction science books for the New England Aquarium for their series with Franklin Watts educational books. In 2009 she founded Elefolio LLC, a life science communication company, working on print and digital projects, from Websites and podcasts to graphic novels that further the public understanding of science. She was the editor in the life sciences at Harvard University Press, acquiring and commissioning books, including The Annotated Origin, an annotated edition of Charles Darwin’s classic; David Bainbridge’s biography of the x chromosome, The X in Sex; and Mean and Lowly Things, Kate Jackson’s account of collecting venomous snakes in the Congo. She has been both student (1987) and staff (1992) at the Radcliffe Publishing Course. She blogs about children’s books at Glass Salamander and about science at Science + Story. Her works in progress include a science fiction novel and a nonfiction account of elephant communication, Elephant Talk, forthcoming from Lerner Books.

Jenny Kuntz Frost ’78
Until her departure from Random House in December 2009, Jenny Kuntz Frost was one of Random House’s great business builders, acquiring, creating, and enhancing a wide range of programs, many of which were the most profitable in the company. A true audio-publishing pioneer, she started Bantam Audio Publishing in the mid-eighties, which then became Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, and in 1998 she assumed responsibility for the consolidated Random House Audio Publishing Group as well as the large print business and Random House Value Publishing. The following year she acquired Listening Library, an independent children’s audio publisher, home to the Harry Potter audio book franchise. In 2001, she acquired the library market audio business, Books on Tape. Also in 2001, she assumed responsibility for Fodor’s and the Information Group businesses. In 2002, Frost was named president and publisher of The Crown Publishing Group, including its numerous imprints. Frost oversaw the publication of dozens of national bestsellers, including those by Cathie Black, Chris Bohjalian, Deepak Chopra, Ann Coulter, Giada DeLaurentiis, Bobby Flay, Alice Hoffman, Ronald Kessler, Erik Larson, Rachael Ray, David Sanger, Suzanne Somers, Martha Stewart, Alice Waters, and Barack Obama’s Dreams of my Father and The Audacity of Hope.

Susan Goodall ’83
Susan Goodall is the editorial development director for Glamour magazine. Goodall’s focus is on strategic development of the Glamour brand beyond the print magazine, including Web, TV, books, multimedia projects, and events. Under her stewardship, glamour.com’s site traffic increased by 321 percent after a successful relaunch in September 2008. In 2009, glamour.com emerged as the women’s magazine Website industry leader, garnering the highest number of unique visits in the women’s lifestyle category for the first quarter. Goodall has overseen the publication of two books, Glamour’s Big Book of Dos & Don’ts: Fashion Help for Every Woman in 2006 and In Search of Hope: The Global Diaries of Mariane Pearl in 2007, along with several TV specials. Prior to joining Glamour in October 2002, Goodall served as executive editor of Worth magazine and has also held positions at Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. A 1983 graduate of Smith College with a bachelor’s in English language and literature, Goodall began her career in publishing at Wiley Publishing. She serves on the board of directors for the New York Women in Communications Foundation. Goodall lives in New York City with her husband, Foster Tennant.

Tish Grier AC ’01
Tish (Patricia) Grier majored in religion and Biblical literature and received her degree as an Ada Comstock Scholar. Little did she know that all the time she spent in front of her computer chatting about her honors thesis with a bunch of folks she would never meet might be the foundation of a career in new media. She is a social media strategist, frequent speaker on uses of social media in business and journalism, founder of PodCampWesternMass, and writes regularly on social media and journalism for Poynter.org. Her knowledge of online community dynamics has been integral to a number of bold experiments in journalism, including Placeblogger.com, a hyper-local news-blog aggregator (2008-09), and Assignment Zero, the first crowd-sourced journalism project published by Wired.com in 2007. In 2006, Grier became one of the first professional bloggers for technology thought leader Corante.com.

Ann Hornaday ’82
Ann Hornaday is the film critic for The Washington Post, where she writes film reviews and features that help readers navigate the universe of movies and media culture in a sophisticated, media-literate way. Most recently, Hornaday completed a yearlong series of stories on “how to watch a movie,” threading viewers through the elements of cinematic style. In 2008, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer in criticism. Previously, Hornaday was a film critic at The Baltimore Sun and the Austin American-Statesman. She started her career at Ms. magazine, where she was an assistant to fellow conference participant and Smith graduate Gloria Steinem. Her Smith degree is in government.

Wendy Kaminer ’71
Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer and social critic, writes about law, liberty, feminism, religion, and popular culture. A former Guggenheim fellow, she received a Smith College Medal in 1998 and is currently a correspondent at theatlantic.com. Her latest book is Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity & the ACLU (Beacon Press). Her seven previous books include Free for All: Defending Liberty in America Today; Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety; and A Fearful Freedom: Women’s Flight from Equality. Her articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Nation. Her commentaries have aired on National Public Radio. She is a former board member of the American Civil Liberties Union and currently serves on the advisory boards of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the Secular Coalition for America

Charlise Lyles ’81
Charlise Lyles is the co-founding editor of Catalyst Cleveland
and conceived the publication’s expansion to Catalyst Ohio. The
non-profit, bimonthly magazine, now in its eleventh year, provides
independent reporting and analysis on urban education issues. From
teacher quality to No Child Left Behind to inequitable state funding,
Catalyst examines how policy and programs play out in the real world of
the classroom. Under Lyles’s decade-long leadership, Catalyst received
numerous prizes for journalistic excellence, including: two first-place
Clarion awards (2007 and 2009) from the national Association for Women
in Communications; and two Best Social Justice Reporting from the Ohio
Society of Professional Journalists; and best essay from the Press Club
of Cleveland. As public editor for The Virginian-Pilot from 1991-93, Lyles
fielded reader complaints, investigated any alleged improprieties by
reporters, and investigated all errors for correction. She also wrote a
weekly column, explaining newspaper practices and policies to readers.
As ombudswoman, she also spoke to community groups about newsroom
decision-making. At the time, she was one of only two African-American
newspaper ombudspersons in the country. Prior to her appointment as ombudswoman at The Virginian-Pilot, Lyles covered police, city hall, social services, courts and wrote features; she was also a metro columnist for several years. In 1987, she was part of a team awarded the Copeland Public Service award for contributions to a series in The Virginian-Pilot on poverty and low-income housing in an affluent city. In 1990, Lyles was one of six recipients of a national Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship (awarded by Newsday), which allowed her to do 12-month report on a national high school program for low-income students. That same year, she was awarded for distinguished commentary from the Hampton Roads chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists. In 1999 as a reporter for the Dayton Daily News, Lyles received first and second place awards for Best Religion Coverage from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists. She also received SPJ's best African-American series award for a report on black babyboomers. She received community accolades for a three-part series on white poverty. Lyles is the author of Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? From the Projects to Prep School, a memoir of race, class and education; a second edition was published in fall 2008. In late May 2009, Amazon.com ranked it the third best-selling, non-fiction book in Cleveland. It is required reading in two education and social policy courses at Cleveland State University, as well as a few high schools. In 2008, Lyles received a fellowship from the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism at the John Glenn School at The Ohio State University. The fellowship allowed her to study new techniques in digital media, such as pod casting, video editing and digital photography. Lyles began her career as a clerk for New York Times White House Correspondent Hedrick Smith. Lyles received a B.A. in English literature from Smith College in 1981. She studied in an M.F.A. creative writing program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. She has received a certificate in project management from the Executive Education Program at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management. She has attended numerous conferences and seminars on education policy conducted by the Education Writers Association. Lyles has served on the boards of Policy Bridge, a Northeast Ohio think tank on African American issues (education, healthcare, employment and African American men), and Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio.

Katy McColl ’99
Katy McColl is the author of Should I Do What I Love? and a contributing editor at More, Country Living, and pinkofperfection.com. Most recently, as executive editor of Country Living, McColl helped rethink and rebrand the Hearst title, boosting newsstand sales. Prior to that, she worked as executive editor for O at Home, Oprah Winfrey’s home magazine. McColl has written op-eds and other stories for The New York Times, CBS Moneywatch.com, Travel + Leisure, Page Six Magazine, and Jane, where she reported on underground American culture for eight years. She also co-authored Lonely Planet’s guide to New York City. McColl studied Spanish literature at Smith and lived at Talbot and Chase.

Judith Bronstein Milestone ’66
Judy Milestone retired in November 2001 as the senior vice president, network booking, for CNN, where she was responsible for live news interviews and research for CNN, CNN International and CNN Interactive, and coordinating interviews with CNNfn, CNNSI, CNNradio and CNN Headline News. At CNN, she was a member of the editorial board, the executive committee, the liaison to the Gallup Organization, and chair of the education study group. She represented CNN at the Madrid peace conference, the Tokyo economic summit, and all political conventions from 1984 to 2000. Since leaving CNN, she has worked on projects for PBS and she currently teaches public diplomacy at UCLA. A magna cum laude graduate of Smith College, she holds a master’s from the University of Pennsylvania. She serves as vice chair of the Board of Trustees of Smith College, chairs the committee on trustee governance, and was trustee chair for the inaugural of President Carol Christ. Until her recent move to Los Angeles, she chaired the Atlanta steering group of the Council on Foreign Relations, and still sits on the council’s national program committee. During 2003, she was a member of the US advisory commission on public diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim world. In addition, she served on the advisory committee for the Helsinki Women’s Business Summit, and in 2004, a parallel project for Latvia, all under the auspices of the US Department of State.

Carolina Miranda ’93
Carolina Miranda is a freelance writer and editor based in New York City, where she contributes articles on travel, culture, and the arts for a variety of national and regional media, including Time, ArtNews, Travel + Leisure, Budget Travel, Florida Travel + Life, Lonely Planet, nytimes.com, and Fast Company. She is also a contributing editor on cultural topics to WNYC, the public radio affiliate in New York City, where she is overseeing the station’s coverage related to the 2010 Whitney Biennial exhibition. Previously, she worked as a reporter for Time magazine, where she reported on the arts, education, and social issues, among other subjects. During her time there, she interviewed Al Gore about his global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, reported on the burgeoning industry of skatepark design, and was part of the team that broke the news of irregularities in FEMA director Michael Brown’s resume in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Last fall, she was named one of eight fellows in the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program for her arts and architecture blog C-Monster.net. In 2010, the New York Times named her one of nine people to follow on Twitter. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Ed Tahaney.

Kate O’Brian ’80
Kate O’Brian was named senior vice president for ABC News in November 2007. In this role she is responsible for newsgathering operations, including the Washington bureau, NewsOne, ABC News Radio, and affiliate relations. Previously, O’Brian was the vice president of NewsOne and ABSAT, where she managed ABC’s affiliate news service and the satellite newsgathering arm of ABC. In 2003, O’Brian was ABC News’ southern bureau chief in Atlanta, where she coordinated assignments for the various platforms of ABC News, including network news coverage, NewsOne, ABC News Radio, and ABCNEWS.com. A twenty-seven-year veteran of ABC News, she has served in many roles, including as general manager of programming for ABC News Radio responsible for editorial content, overseas field producer in Rome and London, producer for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, both in Washington, DC and New York, and manager in talent development. O’Brian has won an Alfred I. DuPont Award as part of the This Week with David Brinkley team, an Emmy Award for the 2000 Millennium coverage, and a second Alfred I. Dupont and a Peabody Award for September 11 coverage.

Sherrill Redmon
Sherrill Redmon is the director of the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History Archives and coordinator of special collections at Smith. Her academic interests focus on the political, social, cultural, and intellectual experience of women in the United States. Most recently, Redmon and her team collaborated with the Ford Foundation to implement the Voices of Feminism Archival Development Project, an ambitious initiative designed to expand the demographic scope of primary sources available for the study of recent US women’s history. Previously, Redmon was director of the Women’s Manuscripts Collection and head of medical special collections at the University of Louisville. There she conducted oral histories, oversaw microfilming projects, and acquired collections documenting regional medical history, the bourbon industry, and more. She is a 1965 graduate of the University of Louisville and in 1974 received a PhD in history from the University of Kentucky. Two of her three daughters graduated from Smith.

Karen Russo ’96  
Karen Russo is an ABC News reporter based in New Delhi, India. In this role she contributes on- and off-air reporting to all ABC News broadcasts, ABC News Radio and ABC NewsOne, the network's affiliate news service, and also regularly files for ABC News’ digital platforms, including ABCNEWS.com, ABC News NOW, and webcasts. Over the past several months, Russo has worked in Afghanistan, embedding with US troops and covering features and breaking news. She has reported throughout South Asia and Southeast Asia on breaking news and feature stories, including the Mumbai attacks in 2008. Earlier last fall she reported and produced for the ABC News bureau in Baghdad. Russo has been a field producer for Nightline. She also produced reports for the ABC News special, A Call to Action: Saving Our Children, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Award. In 2006, Russo received a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Care Fellowship to report on mental health care in Ethiopia. Before joining ABC News, she was a print journalist. Raised in Southborough, Massachusetts, Russo received a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Cynthia Samuels ’68
Cynthia Samuels, currently Managing Editor of Care2, Causes, has been working with blogs and bloggers for five years, has been part of BlogHer, the women’s blogger organization for four of its five years of existence and has spoken at three BlogHer conventions. An avid blogger herself, Samuels has served blog-related clients in the fields of health, reproductive rights, parenting and women’s rights, among others. Beyond her work with bloggers, Samuels has an extensive background online, on television and in print. Previous online experience includes lengthy stints at iVillage, Amazon and EXCITE.. She also has considerable journalism experience, creating content for several news and public affairs programs including nine years at the TODAY SHOW and seven at CBS News.. Author of It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) she has also published numerous New York Times and Washington Post book reviews and several other articles and reports. A graduate of Smith College in American Studies, Cynthia began her professional life ad a press secretary in the McCarthy for President campaign in 1968. She is passionate about child welfare and education, women’s issues, and spent four years on the DC board of Teach for America. She lives in Washington, DC with her psychiatrist husband, currently a law student. They have two grown sons, both of whom are video game producers.

Patricia Skarda
Patricia Skarda earned a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, where she also taught before coming to Smith. Besides publishing on the Romantic period and co-editing The Evil Image: Two Centuries of Gothic Short Fiction and Poetry (1981), Skarda has published two collections of literature written by Smith alumnae, including Smith Voices: Selected Works by Smith College Alumnae. At Smith, she won the senior faculty teaching award in 1987 and 2008. Professor Skarda has spent two years away from Smith as an American Council on Education fellow in academic administration (1978–79) and as a distinguished visiting professor at the US Air Force Academy (1992–93).

Joanna Slater ‘97
Joanna Slater is the New York bureau chief for The Globe & Mail,
Canada's national newspaper. Prior to joining the Globe, she worked
for The Wall Street Journal, where her assignments included reporting
on the financial crisis out of New York and covering South Asian
business and politics from Mumbai. She spent seven years in Asia,
based first in Hong Kong and then in India, where she covered a wide
range of topics, from the massacre of the royal family in Nepal to the
Kashmir dispute to discrimination against HIV-positive children.
Joanna grew up in Toronto and has completed two masters degrees from
Columbia University, one in International Affairs and one in
Journalism.

J. Courtney Sullivan ’03
J. Courtney Sullivan is the author of the bestselling novel Commencement. A Brooklyn-based writer, her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, Elle, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Allure, In Style, Men’s Vogue, the New York Observer, Tango, and in the essay anthology The Secret Currency of Love (Morrow.) She contributes to the Website someecards.com, and is co-editing an anthology about young women and feminism with Courtney E. Martin. She serves on the advisory board of Girls Write Now and works in the editorial department of The New York Times.

Elizabeth (Beth) Taylor ’75
Beth Taylor teaches in the nonfiction writing program in the Department of English at Brown, where she directed the program from 2004 to 2009. She teaches creative nonfiction: literary journalism, historical narrative, memoir, and radio nonfiction. She earned her PhD in American literature from Brown in 1989, then taught at Harvard before returning to Brown. A former feature writer, and now book reviewer, for the Providence Journal, her most recent essays include a reflection on Brown’s new nonfiction writing program in composition studies, “Apprenticing Nonfictionists” in The Journal of Teaching Writing, and “Itches and Scratches” in Brown Alumni Magazine. She has written numerous essays on the Vietnam War era in various publications, including the anthology, Friends and the Vietnam War, on the Website “Writing Vietnam”; and on NPR’s “This I Believe” series. The final publication in this series is her book, The Plain Language of Love and Loss: A Quaker Memoir, published by the University of Missouri Press, 2009.

Ellen Weiss ’81
Ellen Weiss became senior vice president for news at National Public Radio in April 2007. She is an award-winning broadcast news executive who has served as head of the NPR News national desk and executive producer of the top-rated daily NPR News magazine All Things Considered. Weiss oversees NPR’s worldwide journalism operations, including nineteen domestic and seventeen foreign bureaus; more than 400 staff members; more than forty hours of news programming weekly; and NPR’s award-winning investigations, long-form series, and other special reporting. Weiss joined NPR News in 1982. For twelve years, she was executive producer of the daily NPR newsmagazine All Things Considered. She was responsible for its broadcasts from around the United States and the world — including Berlin during the fall of communism, San Francisco after the 1989 earthquake, L.A. in the midst of the 1992 riots, and Jerusalem during the 1996 elections. Weiss has also served as a senior producer, editor, field producer, and director at NPR News. From 2001 to 2006, she was senior editor of the national desk, managing eighty reporters, editors, and producers covering all national issues, including politics, business, religion, education, immigration, police, and prisons. She oversaw coverage of major national events; among them, NPR News’ critically acclaimed work covering 9/11, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the 2002 and 2004 elections. She has been part of the NPR News teams that have received such honors as Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, George Foster Peabody Awards, Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards, Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, Overseas Press Club Awards, and American Women in Radio and Television Awards. Weiss received her Smith degree in international relations.