Journalist Mark Trahant  serves as the 20th Atwood Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska Anchorage. The position brings nationally known journalists to teach courses and speak to students, journalists and the public in Alaska.Trahant was recently awarded a fellowship to the Rockefeller Bellagio Center in Italy and for the past three years, he was an editor in residence at the University of Idaho, School of Journalism and Mass Media. In 2009, he was awarded a Kaiser Media Fellowship and wrote about health care reform, focusing on its impact in Indian Country. He also reported for PBS’ Frontline series, featuring a program titled “The Silence,” a piece about sexual abuse committed by priests in an Alaska native village.

Trahant is the former editor of the editorial page for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he chaired the daily editorial board, directed a staff of writers, editors and a cartoonist. He has been chairman and chief executive officer at the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and a former columnist at The Seattle Times. He has been publisher of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News in Moscow, Idaho; executive news editor of The Salt Lake Tribune; a reporter at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix; and has worked at several tribal newspapers.

“This is an exciting time for a young person to begin a career in journalism today,” Trahant said. “I look forward to working with the students at the University of Alaska Anchorage to help shape that future.”

Trahant will teach Information Gathering and Global Media and Communications Systems this fall and Multimedia Journalism and Enterprise Reporting in the spring.

The Atwood Chair of Journalism is among the nation’s most prestigious endowed journalism chairs. Anchorage Times publisher Robert B. Atwood established the Atwood Chair at the University of Alaska Anchorage in 1979. Among the many positive contributions Bob and Evangeline Atwood made to Alaska’s civic life, the Atwood Chair of Journalism has helped educate the state’s next generation of journalists.

Learn more about the 2014 Atwood Chair.

Trahant is an editor, reporter, columnist, television correspondent and the author of several books. A member of Idaho’s Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and former president of the Native American Journalists Association, he has been reporting on Native American issues since the 1970s. Trahant’s most recent book “The Last Great Battle of the Indian Wars,” is about Sen. Henry M. Jackson. He also publishes a daily poem about the news to Twitter @newsrimes4lines.

Mark Trahant