Roy Harris will have his 12th annual Pulitzer Prize preview published by Poynter.org in April. Roy retired in 2013 after a reporting and editing career at The Wall Street Journal, and later The Economist Group’s CFO Magazine. He began contributing to Poynter in 2003, and began previewing the Pulitzers for Poynter in 2009. Columbia U. Press brought out Roy’s book Pulitzer’s Gold in an updated new edition for the Pulitzer Prize centennial in 2016. www.pulitzersgold.com.
The world premiere of Alex Gruhin’s play, “Missed Connections,” received rave reviews this past weekend from Chris Jones at the Chicago Tribune and Catey Sullivan at the Chicago Sun-Times (3.5/4 stars). Limited tickets remain for the balance of the run at Chicago’s MacArthur and multi-Jeff Award winning A Red Orchid Theatre.
“Missed Connections” is a live, interactive play with magic, conceived for virtual experience, and runs online, “in Chicago” through February 28th, 2021 for 24 performances. The play, a magician’s cosmic love story inspired by the work of Haruki Murakami, Marshall McLuhan and Derren Brown, takes 25 audience members on a roundtrip voyage to the stars in search of the invisible thread that connects them all.
Tickets for the virtual production, $25/household, are available now at A Red Orchid Theatre’s website: https://aredorchidtheatre.org/missed-connections/
Catherine Toth Fox penned her first children’s book, “Kai Goes to the Farmers Market in Hawaiʻi” (Beachhouse Publishing) last year and is working on her second. She continues to serve as editor of HAWAIʻI Magazine, a Honolulu-based national travel brand, and editor of Hawaiʻi Farm & Food, the official magazine of the Hawaiʻi Farm Bureau. She currently lives in Honolulu with her husband, son and two dogs.
Ronny Glasner Frishman is the author of Nina Allender, Suffrage Cartoonist, With a Drawing Pencil She Helped Win the Vote for Women, a middle-grade book published in September 2020 by Bedazzled Ink Publishing Co. (available on Amazon.com and B&N.com). One of only a few female political cartoonists in the early 20th century, Allender was the “official cartoonist” of The Suffragist, the weekly newspaper of the National Woman’s Party, founded by the famous activist Alice Paul. Allender created nearly 300 cartoons on suffrage and women’s rights; her “Allender girl” was viewed as the period’s ideal of the modern female agitator. Frishman, pf Rochester, NY, wrote and edited for newspapers, magazines and other media for nearly 40 years.
Larry Bleiberg was recently elected president of the Society of American Travel Writers (SATW.org), the world’s oldest and largest group of travel communicators. It has nearly 1,000 members, including staff writers, editors, book authors, photographers and website owners, along with public relations professionals. His term lasts through 2021.
Bleiberg, an eight-time winner of the Lowell Thomas Journalism Awards, is former travel editor of The Dallas Morning News and Coastal Living magazine.
He has freelanced for the last decade, with his writing appearing in BBC.com, National Geographic books, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Better Homes and Gardens, AARP, Afar, CNN, Delta Sky and Atlas Obscura, among many outlets and publications.
He is also the founder of CivilRightsTravel.com, an online guide to visiting sites from the historic civil rights movement. He is based in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Paul Gilje (BSJ59, MSJ60)
The book highlights the half-century history of the drama in Minnesota’s property tax-base sharing law–more popularly known as the metropolitan fiscal disparities law– that began in 1968 with extensive controversy, and extends to the present day. The drama began in a Citizens League committee where the possibility of tax-base sharing first surfaced. It continued in a three-year battle in the Minnesota Legislature, followed by three lengthy, but ultimately unsuccessful, challenges in the Minnesota state courts.
The drama then shifted to efforts to weaken the law’s provisions, which with one notable exception involving the Mall of America, were unsuccessful. In the 1990s drama extended to Minnesota’s Iron Range, where similar tax-base sharing was enacted. Discussion, with more drama possible, has continued in Minnesota and in other states to the present day. The book contains meticulous documentation, with more than 300 footnotes.
The Center for Policy Design(CPD) is publishing the book to help illustrate the importance of highlighting system change in public policy, as advocated by Walter McClure, founder and president of the CPD. McClure’s objective, as quoted in a foreword to the book: “Systems and organizations tend to behave the way they’re structured and rewarded to behave. If you don’t like the way they’re behaving, you probably ought to change the way they’re structured and rewarded.”
Tax-base sharing adjusts the system within which municipalities compete with one another for tax base. Traditionally “winner-take-all,” the system enacted in 1971 still favors the winners, but not by quite as much. Without the law a 13-to-1 ratio in per capita commercial-industrial value would prevail today between the wealthiest and poorest municipalities over 9,000 population in the Twin Cities metro area. With the law the difference is reduced to 6-to-1.
Nancy Johnson (BSJ93 – CAS93)
It’s 2008, and the rise of Barack Obama ushers in a new kind of hope. In Chicago, Ruth Tuttle, an Ivy-League educated Black engineer, is married to a kind and successful man. He’s eager to start a family, but Ruth is uncertain. She has never gotten over the baby she gave birth to—and was forced to give up—when she was a teenager.
She had promised her family she’d never look back, but Ruth knows that to move forward, she must make peace with the past. Returning home, Ruth discovers the Indiana factory town of her youth is plagued by unemployment, racism, and despair. While her family is happy to see her, they remind her of the painful sacrifices they made to give her a shot at a better future—like the comfortable middle-class life she now enjoys.
Determined, Ruth begins digging into the past. As she uncovers burning secrets her family desperately wants to hide, she unexpectedly befriends Midnight, a young white boy who is also adrift and looking for connection. When a traumatic incident strains the town’s already scorching racial tensions, Ruth and Midnight find themselves on a collision course that could upend both their lives.
The Kindest Lie examines the heartbreaking divide between Black and white communities and plumbs the emotional depths of the struggles faced by ordinary Americans in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Capturing the profound racial injustices and class inequalities roiling society, Nancy Johnson’s debut novel offers an unflinching view of motherhood in contemporary America and the never-ending quest to achieve the American Dream.
Mark Sullivan (MSJ84)
The bestselling author of BENEATH A SCARLET SKY (and many other bestselling and award-winning novels) returns with THE LAST GREEN VALLEY (May 4, 2021; Lake Union), a compelling and immersive historical novel inspired by one family’s incredible true story of daring, survival and triumph during the dark days of World War II.
Lisa Keefe has been promoted to editor-in-chief of Meatingplace, overseeing all its editorial operations including its business wire service, magazine, multimedia and social media efforts, and new product development. Previously she was editor of the magazine.