Category: Featured Class Notes

Summer Nettles is producing and directing a six-episode docuseries entitled “She Quit” that will air on Rocky Mountain PBS. The series focuses on the exit of Black women from the traditional workforce due to its negative impact on their health, financial and emotional wellbeing. Nettles hopes to complete the series by September of 2021. She’s currently seeking donors and sponsors to help bring these stories to life. To learn more about the series, share a story or donate reach out to her at Summer@GreaterPurposeMedia.com.

Gina Gibbs Foster has been named Vice President of Corporate Communications for Staples, headquartered in Framingham, Mass. In this role, Gina is responsible for leading the public relations strategy for the company’s external and internal stakeholders. In addition to serving as a key adviser to the CEO and Senior Leadership Team of Staples, Gina provides oversight for all aspects of media relations, issues and crisis management, employee communications, financial communications, corporate reputation and branding. Prior to joining Staples, Gina progressed through a series of Public Affairs and Corporate Communications management roles of increasing responsibility at The Dow Chemical Company, Linde plc, and Messer Americas. She earned a Master’s Degree in Public Policy and Administration from Northwestern University in 2014.

Melissa Grady who has served as the CMO of Cadillac since 2019, was named to the third-annual Forbes CMO Next list. This honor spotlights innovative marketing leaders who are transforming or redefining their role. Grady was recognized for her collaborations with stars such as Spike Lee and Timothée Chalamet as well as her modernization of Cadillac’s digital marketing and ability to adapt during the pandemic.

Read more about Grady’s honor

Tyler Pager joined The Washington Post in March to cover the White House. He previously covered the White House for Politico.

The Southern Environmental Law Center awarded Tony Bartelme its 2021 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award for his stories about climate change, including threats to the Santee River Delta ecosystem and a rare bird, the eastern black rail. Bartelme is a special projects reporter for The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina.

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.