SPEAKERS

2005 faculty

From Pulitzer Prize winners to expert editors, researchers and storytellers, we've assembled a first-rate faculty to stoke your passion for the profession and expand your writing horizons.

Here are many of the speakers who you'll learn from at this year's National Writers Workshop.

Keynote: Dan Barry - An Epiphany: This Is What We Do
"About New York" columnist for The New York Times, author of "Pull Me Up: A Memoir" and a Pulitzer Prize winner for investigative reporting

Barry describes his job as the "About New York" columnist as wandering around New York City asking people "nosy questions." Barry shared a 1994 Pulitzer Prize with a team of reporters working at the Providence Journal-Bulletin who uncovered corruption in the Rhode Island court system. His memoir, "Pull Me Up," was published in 2004.

Workshop: Writing in the Big City.

Cynthia Gorney
Associate professor of journalism at University of California-Berkeley

Gorney was a former staff writer at The Washington Post, where she worked as a West Coast-based features writer for the Style section. She is the author of "Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars." At Berkeley, she specializes in teaching long-form reporting and writing for newspapers and magazines.

Workshop: Reporting on Colliding Cultures - Tips for social-conflict reporting that reaches deeper beneath the surface.

Lisa Pollak
Producer, National Public Radio's "This American Life"

Pollak joined NPR's "This American Life" in April 2004 after spending seven years as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun, where she won the Pulitzer Prize for her story "The Umpire's Sons."

Workshop: "Playing it by Ear": What newspaper writers can learn from radio storytellers

Leslie Bennetts
Contributing editor, Vanity Fair magazine

Bennetts is well known for writing intriguing celebrity interviews and profiles. Among the many she's written about are Nicole Kidman, Hillary Clinton, Queen Noor and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Previously, she worked as a reporter at The New York Times for 10 years.

Workshop: The Art of the Profile

Erik Larson
Author of "The Devil in the White City" and former Wall Street Journal reporter

Larson was nominated for the National Book Award for his nonfiction bestseller "The Devil in the White City." He is a former features writer for The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, where he is still a contributing writer. His magazine stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's.

Workshop: Telling Detail: When animating history, or any story for that matter, it's the little things that count

Jacqui Banaszynski
Associate managing editor for The Seattle Times and winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

At The Seattle Times, Banaszynski is in charge of special enterprise projects and staff development. She is the Knight Chair Professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, where she is developing programs in editing and writing excellence. Banaszynski won a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for her series "AIDS in the Heartland," which she wrote while a reporter at the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Workshop: Literary Forensics - Diagnosing your writing from the inside out

Louise Kiernan
Projects writer for The Chicago Tribune.

Kiernan was the lead writer on "Gateway to Gridlock," an extensive look at the American air-traffic system, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. She was also a finalist for a Pulitzer in the same category for an individual project about a woman killed by a piece of falling glass.

Workshop: The Challenges, Perils and Pitfalls of Personal Journalism (or how to date, go steady and happily part ways with your sources)

Charles Cross
Author of "Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain" and former editor of "The Rocket" magazine.

Cross served as editor of "The Rocket," a biweekly music and entertainment magazine published in Seattle, for 14 years. He's the author of four books on subjects including Nirvana, Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin. His forthcoming Jimi Hendrix biography, "Room Full of Mirrors," is due out in August 2005.

Workshop: Does Courtney Love Pass the Smell Test? Research, truth-telling and legwork in nonfiction reporting

Closing Keynote: Roy Peter Clark
Senior scholar and vice president of Poynter Institute and author of "Free to Write: A Journalist Teaches Young Writers."

Clark is one of the nation's top journalism teachers. He's been an instructor at Poynter since 1979 and is the author of "Free to Write: A Journalist Teaches Young Writers." Before joining Poynter, he was the writing coach at St. Petersburg Times.

Workshop: Making Hard Facts Easy Reading; and Fifty Writing Tools in Fifty Minutes

Bill Plaschke
Sports columnist for The Los Angeles Times

Plaschke has been a sports columnist at The Los Angeles Times since 1996 and has made nationally recognized contributions in both journalism and public service. Plaschke has been named National Sports Columnist of the Year by a variety of organizations, including The Associated Press. He has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and his work has been featured in several editions of the "Best American Sports Writing." He has also published a collection of his columns titled "Plaschke: Good Sports, Spoil Sports, Foul Balls and Odd Balls."

Workshop: Juiced: How an injection of anabolic reporting and writing can turn a pop-fly story into a home run. And it's all legal!

Mary Hadar
Assistant managing editor/front-page features for The Washington Post

Hadar has been editing feature stories at The Washington Post for more than 20 years, starting as a copy editor, progressing to night editor, deputy editor and then assistant managing editor in charge of the Style section. Taking her features touch to the A section in 1996, Hadar assumed a newly created position: AME/front page features. She's also The Post's writing coach.

Workshop: Writing Your Story onto the Front Page

Tommy Tomlinson
Columnist for The Charlotte Observer

Tomlinson has worked for The Charlotte Observer for 15 years and has written a column for the past eight. Last year, The Week magazine named Tomlinson the best local columnist in America. He also won the American Society of Newspaper Editors' award for profile writing. The winning stories appeared in the book "Best Newspaper Writing 2004."

Workshop: People in 3-D: How to Write Profiles that Leap Off the Page; and The Seven Keys to Recharge Your Creative Spirit, Learn to Love Your Job Again and (Possibly) Win Large Cash Prizes

Deborah Bach
Education reporter for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Bach has been a newspaper reporter since 1992. She worked for newspapers in the Greater Vancouver area before coming to the U.S. in 2000 as one of three reporters from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico selected to participate in the North American Journalist Exchange program. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The New York Daily News, The Vancouver Sun and The National Post.

Workshop: On the Beat: Keeping it Fresh and Smart (with Janet Tu and Lornet Turnbull)

Jack Hart
Managing editor for The Oregonian

Hart is The Oregonian's managing editor, but he's also worked as a reporter, arts editor, Sunday magazine editor, training editor and writing coach. He has edited two Pulitzer Prize winning stories (and contributed to a third).

Workshop: One-Day Wonders: The Secrets of Short Narrative

Ken Armstrong
Investigative reporter at The Seattle Times

Armstrong previously worked at the Chicago Tribune, where he co-wrote six series on criminal-justice issues, including one that helped prompt the Illinois governor to suspend executions and then empty Death Row. His work in Chicago, with fellow reporter Steve Mills, is featured in a recently published book, "Shaking the Foundations: 200 years of Investigative Journalism in America."

Workshop: Chasing paper (or: How quotes and color are never enough)

Ruby de Luna
Features reporter at KUOW

De Luna reports on a wide range of issues, but her interest has been on Seattle's immigrant community - a natural draw because de Luna is a transplant from Taipei, Taiwan. Before KUOW, de Luna worked in the Washington state legislature as a broadcast information assistant for the House Democrats.

Workshop: My Adventure with Food...or how producing a radio documentary taught me about other cultures, storytelling, and building trust

Bill Dietrich
Seattle Times reporter for Pacific Northwest magazine

Dietrich has been covering the Northwest since 1973 and splits his time between writing for The Seattle Times Pacific Northwest magazine and authoring books: three nonfiction and five fiction. Dietrich was part of The Seattle Times team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Workshop: So You Want to be an Author: How Book Writing Can Sharpen Journalistic Thinking, Improve Storytelling; and Drive You Crazy and The Joy of Science: How Tapping Your Inner Nerd Can Give You The Best Assignments in Journalism.

Janet Tu
Religion reporter for The Seattle Times

Since taking on the religion beat three years ago, Tu has written on a range of topics, from the historical accuracy of the Gospels in relation to Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" to the election-year efforts of an evangelical pastor. She has also written for The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine.

Workshop: On the Beat: Keeping it Fresh and Smart (with Lornet Turnbull and Deborah Bach)

Nigel Jaquiss
Willamette Week staff reporter

Jaquiss joined Willamette Week in 1998. He has covered a variety of beats, including schools, white-collar crime and city hall. Last year, in "The 30-Year Secret," Jaquiss broke the news that former Portland mayor and Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt had sexually abused a 14-year-old in the 1970s. Jaquiss has won three first-place awards from the national Education Writers Association and is a two-time runner-up for the Bruce Baer Award, Oregon's top journalism prize.

Workshop: How I Got the Story - The investigation that unlocked a 30-year-old secret about Oregon's most influential citizen.

Erica C. Barnett
The Stranger staff reporter

Barnett covers City Hall and transportation, and writes a weekly politics column for Seattle's alternative weekly. She also serves on the paper's editorial board. Before she came to the Stranger in 2003, Barnett was a staff writer for Seattle Weekly, where she covered transportation, housing and city politics. In 2001, she won an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies award for a story about Seattle companies' use of prison labor.

Workshop: Why work at a Weekly?

Lornet Turnbull
Seattle Times immigration/gay rights reporter

Turnbull joined the staff of the Seattle Times a little over a year ago covering immigration and diversity issues. She previously worked at the Columbus Dispatch where she was recognized for enterprise reporting and coverage of the 2000 Census. Turnbull has traveled to the Middle East to report on the ongoing conflict there.

Workshop: On the Beat: Keeping it Fresh and Smart (with Janet Tu and Deborah Bach)

Miyoko Wolf
News researcher for The Seattle Times

Wolf is one of four researchers at the Seattle Times, where's she's worked for the last five years. In addition to training newsroom staff on databases and on how to find people, records and data, she has been instrumental in tracking down sources and information for news and breaking news stories. Her experience ranges from tracking down families of 'Green River Killer' victims, to finding stories and accumulating data on airport security breaches.

Workshop: Finding People and Information

Hal Bernton
Seattle Times reporter

Bernton spent January 2004 in Iraq and after returning, assisted in home-front reporting as well as other regional reporting. More recently, Bernton spent three weeks in Indonesian reporting on the aftermath of the tsunami.

He has worked at The Seattle Times since 2000 and previously worked at The Oregonian and The Anchorage Daily News, where he worked on a team that won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting on the plight of Alaska's native peoples.

Workshop: To Iraq and Back: In a Time of War, Finding the Stories that Connect with the Pacific Northwest's Home-front Readers (with Mike Gilbert, The Tacoma News-Tribune, and Mike Francis, The Oregonian)

Mike Francis
The Oregonian reporter

Francis has been a reporter, assistant city editor, business columnist and technology editor at various times for The Oregonian since 1990. Before being chosen as The Oregonian's Baghdad-based reporter, he was a business reporter in the Metro West bureau. He previously was editor of The Business Journal in Portland, and a reporter for The Bulletin in Bend, Ore., the Kansas City Business Journal and the Kansas City Star.

Mike Gilbert
The News Tribune (Tacoma) military reporter

Gilbert has been a reporter and editor at The News Tribune for 17 years, the last four covering the troops and installations of the Pacific Northwest. He went to Iraq twice with Army units from Fort Lewis, including a four-month stay with the Army's first Stryker brigade.

Nina Shapiro
Seattle Weekly senior editor

Shapiro's work at the Seattle Weekly ranges from investigative journalism to inspiring profiles. Her subjects have included the troubled public-television station KCTS, evangelicals crusading against sex trafficking and the Iraqi refugee community. Most of all, she sees herself as writing about people's lives. Before coming to the Weekly, she wrote for its pioneering sister paper Eastsideweek, freelanced in southern Africa and covered cops and courts in Hudson County, N.J.

Workshop: Zen and the Art of Receptive Interviewing: How to Uncover Tough Truths and Real Lives without Acting Like a Jerk