Don Rearden is the author of the award winning novel The Raven’s Gift and a produced screenwriter. His films have aired on Showtime, and TMC. He is the board president of 49 Writers and an Associate Professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Visit his website.
Don Rearden
After many years at KTUU-Channel 2, Rhonda McBride is moving across town to KTVA-Channel 11. Currently she’s employed by GCI, which is in the process of buying KTVA. Until the sale goes through, Rhonda will be working with her old boss at KTUU, former news director John Tracy, who has been hired by GCI as a consultant to take KTVA’s newsroom to the next level. Rhonda’s focus at KTVA will be on rural Alaska, one of her passions. From dental health to education to politics, Rhonda has won several national awards for her coverage of rural issues.
She gained her experience reporting in the Bush at KYUK, a public radio and television station in Bethel, which broadcasts in both Yup’ik and English. Rhonda has also been a producer at the Alaska Public Radio Network — and hosted political debates and public affairs programs at KAKM-TV, Channel 7. In 2008, Rhonda took a break from broadcasting and worked for Governor Sarah Palin as her Rural Advisor.
Rhonda McBride
Shirley Mae Springer Staten, international keynoter, singer and workshop facilitator, moves people forward beyond their limiting ideas. A born storyteller and dynamic a capella vocalist, she brings an unrivaled blend of vision, passion and sheer virtuosity to her work.
From the age of five, Shirley Mae picked cotton in the fields of Georgia. Her transformation came with many challenges. A daydreamer and dyslexic, she graduated from high school not knowing how to read. By the early 1990s she had managed to work her way through college and earn her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
Shirley Mae, like no one else, can weave words and music to empower her audience. She is a multitalented performing artist who motivates people to recognize and break through their self-imposed limitations. She can hold a group spellbound with stories of her struggles against the obstacles of the world. Her message will show you how to “keep movin’ forward.”
In her latest project, The Oh-ee-O childrens’ books, she recreates the characters and events that influenced her early years. Vividly illustrated by artist Dianne Barske, The Oh-ee-O Story reminds us that life is filled with choices – for both children and adults. Visit her website.
Dianne Barske says ahe has never decided whether she is an artist, writer or teacher, so she has been delighted that doing children’s books let her be all three. She has written and illustrated three children’s books, all related to animals at the Alaska Zoo and has taken them to classrooms to share with the children. This career path led her to many happy adventures, with short-term assignments to teach art in several Bush schools and some unusual art contracts.
She recently finished two big contracts for Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, which featured paintings of bed-bug prevention and the proper dumping of honey buckets. She was thrilled to teach both writing and art for three years to children in Shirley Mae Springer Staten’s Home Based After School Program in Fairview.
Currently, Dianne has a contract for a new children’s book for Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, about their employees’ rescue of a baby musk ox along the Haul Road. Once done, she has the prospect of writing and illustrating books on lemurs in Madagascar, which she is sure will necessitate some exotic travel! Life is full of surprises!
Shirley Mae Springer Staten
Dianne Barske
Elise Sereni Patkotak was born many, many years ago into a much kinder and gentler world. Her initial view of life was bounded by the Italian immigrant neighborhood in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in which she was raised and the nuns who taught her throughout her early years. She is now a recovering Catholic.
Elise lived in Barrow for 28 years, during which time she aged with astounding rapidity. While living in Barrow, she was a nurse, health director, social worker, columnist, radio show host, public information officer, city recreation director and Guardian Ad Litem (GAL), working with troubled kids in the Barrow Court System. She now lives in Anchorage with five parrots, a cockatoo and a very nervous little dog that thinks all the birds are out to get his stuff.
Elise has a small writing/graphics company, Precious Cargo, Ltd., that she hopes will actually turn a profit before she dies. She is a columnist with the Anchorage Daily News and is the author of Parallel Logic, the story of her years in Barrow.
Elise continues to work as a GAL with the Barrow Court System and also volunteers with a wild bird rehab center in Anchorage. She is a foster parent for the companion bird rescue organization, Parrot Education and Adoption Center (PEAC). She is a member of Alaska Professional Communicators and has been both its president and membership chair. She is also a past co-chair of the Alaska Public Broadcasting Commission.
Elise belongs to a wide variety of animal welfare organizations and truly believes that the world will be judged by how it treats its most helpless inhabitants, including its elderly, its young and its animals.
She spent her youth wantonly wasting her money on travel to exotic locations with her sister Judy before those places decided to start killing travelers for sport. She has visited every continent in the world except Antarctica. After living in Alaska she felt that was redundant.
Her primary goal in life now is to live long enough to spend all she has saved for her old age. Thanks to recent economic trends, this may turn out to be much easier than she initially believed possible.
Elise Patkotak
Steve Lindbeck came to public broadcasting in July 2007 after a 30-year career in journalism and public affairs. He is President and General Manager of Alaska Public Telecommunications, Inc. (APTI), which includes KAKM-TV, KSKA-FM and the Alaska Public Radio Network.
He also has served as Vice Chancellor for Advancement at the University of Alaska Anchorage, Associate Editor of the Anchorage Daily News, and Executive Director of the Alaska Humanities Forum. His journalism career included editorial positions at the Anchorage Daily News, the Anchorage Times, the Everett (Wash.) Herald, and the Boston Globe.
He has volunteered on many boards and committees, including the Anchorage Museum Association, the Alaska World Affairs Council, Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Anchorage, United Way of Anchorage, Anchorage Cultural Council, Alaska State Council on the Arts review panels, Downtown Anchorage Rotary, and Commonwealth North.
Lindbeck, an Anchorage resident since 1968, is a graduate of West Anchorage High School and Stanford University. He is married to Patty Ginsburg, a former journalist who now works as a consultant. He loves reading, music, travel, hiking, golf, and the natural and cultural splendor of Alaska.
Ivan Moore, pollster and owner of Ivan Moore Research, will speak at the monthly luncheon of Alaska Professional Communicators. In the days before the Nov. 6 General Election, as things heat up, Moore will provide his perspective and analysis on what the polls say and how to evaluate poll results. If you’ve been receiving dozens of survey phone calls and want some extra insight on who’s doing what, come hear the “inside story.” Moore is also a regular columnist for the Anchorage Press.
Ivan Moore
Toni Massari McPherson grew up on the East Coast and got her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She came to Alaska during the ’70s after spending a year as a VISTA in Delaware and working for a small Pennsylvania newspaper for a couple years. She jumped into the Alaska adventure with both feet, including spending a year in a tepee while she and her firefighter husband built their home in Girdwood. She was a reporter and arts and entertainment director at the Anchorage Times until it closed. As the marketing director of Energy Rated Homes of Alaska for 10 years, she helped the program become the national standard for raising home energy efficiency. At the same time, she freelanced for a variety of local publications including Alaska Military Weekly, Alaska Newspapers and, most recently, F Magazine.
For the last 8.5 years, Toni has served as Anchorage Public Library’s Community Relations Coordinator, serving in a variety of roles including PR/marketing director, volunteer coordinator and program manager for the library’s book sales. She has worked with other staff to expand the library’s profile in the community and has witnessed an on-going metamorphosis in the local institution. Over the last year, the library has invested in a community-wide study of how it should evolve to serve Anchorage in the 21st century. In her talk she will describe some of the results of survey and how it is translating into the Loussac plan for re-modeling. She will also describe challenges the library faces moving into the future.
Toni McPherson
Bob Lyon started with photography by learning to do wet-plate tintypes, the kind of photography done during the Civil War. Since then he has done photojournalism—having work published in the Washington Post, Rugby Magazine, Der Speigel, Civilization Magazine, Mother Jones, L’Express, and the International Herald Tribune, among other print media. Bob specializes in large format photography, using a one hundred year old 4” x 5” Korona. Much of Bob’s large format work has been for the National Park Service in the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record programs. These photographs are filed at the Library of Congress-‐think of the last scene in the first Indiana Jones movie—except these photographs are available online.
His projects have varied from Anasazi ruins in New Mexico to Minuteman III missile complexes in South Dakota. He also visited all 100 Air Force Missile Launch Control Centers in the 1990s to document their artwork. The missile crews painted their underground facilities, rather similar to nose art on bombers in World War II.
From Colorado and a resident of Anchorage for two years, Bob hasn’t produced many local images yet, but he is enthusiastically photographing the Alaska scene. Go here to see some of his work.
Bob currently works for the National Park Service in Anchorage, mainly tasked with historic preservation. One of the projects to which he has been assigned is the preservation of Soapy Smith’s saloon in Skagway, Alaska, at Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park.
Bob Lyon
Journalist and author Carol Sturgulewski will speak at the monthly luncheon for Alaska Professional Communicators. Sturgulewski, oldest daughter of former Governor Murkowski, has recently published White House of the North, an account of a century’s worth of legends, history, and personalities in Alaska’s Governor’s Mansion. She interviewed governors, first ladies, and friends from every administration since 1925 and tells of glamorous balls, wartime austerity and…leaky pipes.
Carol Sturgulewski
Emily Blauhous has been a teacher in the Anchorage School District for over thirty years and has been at Mirror Lake since the school opened 15 years ago. She teaches piano keyboarding classes to music students and is the leader and mentor of a group of students who produce an present daily closed circuit news of the day within the school.
She began a collaboration with Augie Hebert, television and radio pioneer in Alaska, shortly after the school opened. This collaboration grew into a School Business partnership with Channel 11, which has provided professional training and mentoring for middle school students. Several years ago, also through the impetus of Augie Hebert, Mirror Lake Middle School became the only school in Alaska to broadcast over a low power FM station to the school’s neighboring community.
Radio Station Students–Photo by Chris Arend