Photo credit: Kate deVeaux

Now out with her tenth publication on the shelves in the Unites States, Suzanne Selfors (M.A., 1990) has found her calling in writing children’s books. Although the journey to get there wasn’t easy, she said she has found her voice.Selfors’ story begins at the end of her driveway as she watched the school bus drive away carrying her youngest daughter to her first day of elementary school.

“I thought, ‘my life is about to change.’ This is my youngest child; she’s gone off to school and I can actually do something different now,” Selfors said. “I walked up my driveway, sat down at my computer, and I googled local writing classes.”

Selfors registered that same day at the University of Washington in their extension program for short story writing. Selfors had already graduated from the UW years earlier in 1990 with a master’s in communication with a popular culture emphasis. At that time she was interested in studying film, writing a thesis titled “From Menace to Messiah: A Cultural Study of the American Extraterrestrial Encounter Film.”

While at the UW, Selfors had an internship with KCPQ Television, where she was later hired after graduation as a research assistant. Channel 13 had just become the Fox affiliate, so the opportunity was well received.

“I was studying all the trends and trying to help the sales staff convince advertisers where they should place their advertising based on demographic and research information,” Selfors said.

However, Selfors decided to quit her job when she got married and began to start a family. She read to her children every night, even when they were babies, and started to notice something.

“There was a renaissance going on in the children’s publishing world. The Harry Potter books had changed the market and publishers were hungry. I fell in love with Lemony Snicket’s books, and a series by Suzanne Collins called Gregor the Overlander,” Selfors said. “I realized that I really wanted to write fiction.”

Selfors took the ferry from Bainbridge Island every Tuesday and Thursday night to go to the short story writing class at the UW.

“It was the first time I’d ever written an opening chapter for a novel,” Selfors said. “So that was nerve wracking for me. But the positive feedback gave me the courage to move forward with my story.”

In one year, from September 2002 to September 2003, Selfors had written her first adult novel that was set in Ancient Greece, found a literary agent that wanted to represent her, and it was being submitted to 12 publishing houses in New York City. Unfortunately, she got 12 rejection letters in return.

“It was a really dense historical novel and had a lot of research so I can look back and see why it got rejected,” Selfors said, “but I was stubborn so I wrote another adult novel, set it in ancient Greece again and it got rejected.”

When Selfors then wrote a third adult historical fiction novel that did not get picked up, she became discouraged and was close to giving up. But, nonetheless, the next story she wrote was a children’s novel titled “To Catch a Mermaid.” She finished writing it in 2005 and her agent sent it out immediately.

“He sent it to seven houses and all seven made offers on it,” Selfors said. “It went to auction, which is every writers dream because you have publishing houses fighting over you. So I realized I had found my voice and that’s what I was meant to write. It felt right.”

She said in contrast to the historical fiction novels which she had to fight her way through, the children’s books just flowed. Her kids were a major inspiration for “To Catch a Mermaid.”

“I wrote that first book for them,” Selfors said. “I read it to them while I was writing and I knew I was doing something right because at the end of each chapter they would beg me to keep reading.”

Selfors said writer’s block has never been a problem for her and that she has been creating stories in one way or another her whole life.

“I just have a brain that is very noisy,” Selfors said. “I have stories just waiting in line to be told.”

Her latest book “The Sasquatch Escape” debuted last month and is the first in a middle-grade series called, The Imaginary Veterinary Series. Four books in the series are currently under contract, with more to follow. The award-winning illustrator, Dan Santat, is designing the covers.

Selfors said that the best part about her job is getting letters, drawings, and gifts from young readers. She has also written four teen novels that inspire deeper letters from adolescents. Selfors said she responds to every single one.

Selfors is writing for three publishing houses at the moment (Bloomsbury Publishing; Little, Brown and Company; and HarperCollins), but when she has time she would like to try writing an adult novel again someday. Her first Greek novel ended up being published in Greece, so “I figured if the Greeks like it, it can’t be that bad,” Selfors joked. She wants to revisit the novel to smooth it out and try publishing it in the United States again.

“I’m happy that I’m building readership,” Selfors said. “It’s been slow and steady, but with each book I produce it does a little better than the last one.”

Her books have earned starred reviews, been Indie Picks, and Junior Library Guild award-winners. They’ve been included on the School Library Journal Best Books list, YALSA Best Books for Teens List, and multiple state lists, to name a few accolades. And they’ve been Scholastic Book Fair best-sellers.

“A lot of people think to make money in this business you have to be a New York Times best-selling author, but you don’t,” Selfors said. “If you continue to put out work that does well, you can make a living out of this.”

Although, with that being said, Selfors does hope to be a New York Times best-selling author one day.

Here is a list of our scholars and the faculty member who have invested in mentoring these students:

Kylin Munoz, Senior, Communication (Holly Barker, Anthropology)

James Kim, Junior, Communication (Matt McGarrity, Communication)

Yunfei Zhao, Junior, Communication (Jennifer Halpin, English, Odegaard Writing & Research Center; Camille Dodson, English, Odegaard Writing & Research Center)

Riley Taitingfong, Junior, Communication (Ralina Joseph, Communication; Christy Ibrahim, School of Law)

Alexandra (Alex) Kronz Kaethler, Senior, Linguistics, Psychology, Communication (Jason Gilmore, Communication)

Kailin Wang, Senior, Communication, Community, Environment, & Planning
(Daniel Abramson, Urban Design & Planning)

Rachel Donahue, Senior, Communication (Ralina Joseph, Communication; Melanie Hernandez, English)

Trevor Smith, Senior, Communication, International Studies (Mary Callahan, Jackson School of International Studies)

Adiba Khan, Junior, Biochemistry, Communication, Mary Gates Scholar (Heather Mefford, Pediatrics)

Sheridan Smalley, Senior, Communication (Randal Beam, Communication)

Reginald Gillins, Senior, Social Sciences, Evening Degree Program, Communication (Carolyn Jackson, Education (Bothell Campus))

Visit the Undergrad Research website for more information>>

“I am honored and very appreciative to the LAGRANT Foundation for granting me this opportunity,” Silvers said. “I also want to give thanks to those in my corner who supported and continue to support me in my aspirations.”

The Foundation’s motto is “funding dreams into reality,” while their mission is to increase the number of ethnic minorities in fields of advertising, marketing, and public relations. Silvers is African American and Hispanic, and has recently found that what he wants to do and what he is good at falls into the category of public relations.

“A lot of minorities are being looked past in fields such as these because they are lacking experience or prior knowledge,” Silvers said. “I think by the LAGRANT Foundation raising awareness and being so supportive in finding experience for students makes it a great opportunity that deserves tremendous amounts of credit.”

Now a senior planning to do a fifth year, Silvers has been working hard to get his GPA up in order to be competitive for scholarships. He is looking to work in public relations in the entertainment or hospitality field and plans to use the money awarded to fund another study abroad trip.

“I think that studying abroad is something that stands out tremendously in the PR and marketing world,” Silvers said. “A lot of the big agencies are international and I feel as if I have studying abroad as one of my ‘playing cards’ then it makes me stand out as an applicant showing that I can adapt to the culture around me.”

Silvers has done a summer study abroad trip to Barbados and also went on a national student exchange to the University of Hawaii. He said both opportunities gave him a chance to immerse himself in a new culture and identity, which is a great skill to have in the field he is hoping to join one day.

Photo by Sujit kumar, posted on Wikimedia

Graduate student in Marine and Environmental Affairs Chelsea Kahn wrote an Op-Ed article that was published in the Los Angeles Times about what to do with lionfish. The venomous creature has invaded the Atlantic and Caribbean coral reefs and is disrupting the local food chains. Kahn is studying science communication and took COM 597 last quarter with Artist in Residence Usha Lee McFarling. Kahn’s conclusion: eat ‘em.

Read the full article here>>

Azeb Madebo

The first National Communication Association (NCA) Undergraduate Honors Conference will take place at American University in Washington D.C. on May 16 to 19. UW undergraduates Samra Mengistu and Azeb Madebo are among the 40 students who will be attending, as the conference is designed to “assist rising seniors majoring in communication in preparing for their capstone projects and post graduation plans.”

Both students found out about the opportunity through Professor Ralina Joseph. They took Black Cultural Studies during winter quarter and developed their research ideas from that course.

Samra Mengistu

Mengistu taught black history every Wednesday morning at Thurgood Marshall Elementary in South Seattle for the service learning aspect of the class, where she began to n

otice how race operated within the school and the differences between the Accelerated Progress Program (APP) classes and general education.

“The neighborhood kids who are predominantly black living in the area are in the general education program,” she said. “The kids in APP are almost 100 percent white and you can tell what kind of class it is just by walking down the hallway and peeking into the classroom. It’s kind of segregation within the school in 2013, so that was really interesting.”

Mengistu attended American University for two and a half years before transferring to the UW and said it will be nice to go back to visit.

“I want to make more contacts with the communication field and get more direction about what I want to do after I graduate,” she said, “whether that be graduate school or getting a job. I would like to work a couple years before grad school, so it just seemed like a really cool opportunity to meet people.”

Madebo’s research paper is titled, “Subversive Black Cultural Production Concealed within Blackface Minstrelsy,” and covers Richards and Pringle’s Famous Georgia Minstrels and the minstrel show from the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM). She will be adding to the research before the conference by looking into audience readings of texts by scholars like Stuart Hall.

“The conference offers a great opportunity to showcase my work, learn from fellow communication undergrads, and network nationwide for graduate programs and mentorship,” Madebo said. “I think it’s cool that as an undergraduate, I can travel to research conferences with the support of the UW Communication Department.”

Madebo added that she is hoping to feel inspired, motivated, and capable of pursuing her academic endeavors after the conference. Both students will be studying abroad in Barbados this summer, where they will continue to study the role of race in a community.

Join us as we celebrate 10 years of the Native Voices program at UW. Most of our graduates are returning to help celebrate our anniversary.

Friday, May 3rd, 7-10 pm, with a reception at 6pm. University of Washington campus, Kane Hall 220.

Leon Dash speaks to one of Karen Rathe’s classes. Photo by Rathe.

Last week, journalism veteran and professor at the University of Illinois Leon Dash visited the UW Communication Department, speaking to five classes, participating in a mentor lunch, and being the guest-of-honor at the SPJ meeting in just two days.

Dash is best known for winning the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism during his 32-year stint at The Washington Post for a series titled “Rosa Lee’s Story” about a family trapped in the urban underclass.

“Leon himself is a special kind of journalist,” said Christopher Duclos, president of the SPJ at the UW. “The way he combines ethics, professionalism and being a good person is unique from any journalist you might hear about today.”

But the way he got here may be a bit surprising. Dash started out going to college at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He felt that the curriculum was not expansive enough for what he wanted to study – contemporary Africa – so he decided to transfer to Howard University in Washington D.C. in 1965.

“Because my parents were upset with my decision to leave Lincoln, I told them I would pay for my own tuition,” Dash said.

Dash steam cleaned buildings at night and went to school during the day, but as the weather got colder he thought it would be better to look for an indoor job. Someone directed him to a job at The Washington Post as a copyboy working the lobster shift (6:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.).

“There was no line for that job,” Dash joked, “but it was perfect for me.”

Dash started as a copyboy in November 1965, received a summer internship in April 1966, and by December was a staff writer and “that was it, it just took off from there,” Dash said. Dash did a variety of journalism, including being a police reporter, a foreign correspondent, and investigative reporting.

“The ethnographic investigative pieces that I did from 1984 to 1998 were my favorite,” Dash said, “because you are explaining to the public as to why people are in certain situations, what their motivations are, what their worlds are, and most people don’t know that. Most people live in their own world.”

Throughout his career, there were three attempts to have him become an editor (of which he said he sabotaged them all), and young editors coming in who wanted him to change his focus. Dash said he hit the ceiling and already had four offers from four universities when he decided to leave.

Dash’s second daughter became one of the main reasons he chose the University of Illinois. She was born in 1979 with cerebral palsy and at the time was getting ready to graduate high school. U of I was the first in the United States to develop a program for students with disabilities in 1948, Dash said.

Dash has been at the U of I since 1998 and said his main goal for teaching is “to turn out good students, especially those that have that internal drive to be good students, which not all students have, but the ones that do are noticeable.”

“It’s not every day we get someone of his stature to come in and educate us,” Duclos said, “so naturally, like sponges, we absorb all we can in that short amount of time he is with us.”

Along with teaching journalism, Dash is also a professor of African American studies and law at the University of Illinois. He currently holds the Swanlund Chair at the College of Law.

Uploaded by russavia on Wikimedia Commons.

This Friday, 20 students will take part in a “If Tragedy Strikes” workshop where they will grapple with how they’d cover a shooting on campus. Fifteen students from The Daily and/or the journalism program and five students interested in public relations will be divided into teams of reporters, editors, photographers, and crisis managers to take part in a simulation led by publisher and editorial adviser Diana Kramer.

Kramer and professor Randy Beam planned the workshop and have invited several coaches to mentor the students, including executive editor of The Seattle Times David Boardman, multiplatform content manager at KING-TV Kelly Cheadle, associate vice president of media relations and communication at UW Norm Arkans, and UW Police Commander Steve Rittereiser.Mike Fancher, former executive editor of The Seattle Times will do a debriefing on ethical issues at the end of the three-hour training.

This workshop is incredibly timely considering last week’s events in Boston and will prepare students to emotionally and ethically handle such event if one were to occur in our area.

Assistant Professor Katy Pearce is giving a talk titled “Networked Authoritarianism in Azerbaijan: How the Azerbaijani government uses the Internet to deter dissent” on May 2 at 7 p.m. in HUB 214. Pearce holds affiliation with the Ellison Center for Russian East European, and Central Asian Studies and specializes in technology and media use in the Former Soviet Union. Her research focuses on social and political uses of technologies and digital content in the transitioning democracies and semi-authoritarian states of the South Caucasus and Central Asia, but primarily Armenia and Azerbaijan. This talk will cover the increased importance of online political life in Azerbaijan and the role of social media.

For more information about the talk, visit the Ellison Center website. It will also be livestreamed here.

Almeera Anwar (L) and KC Cowen (R) with Department Chair David Domke. Photo by Victoria Sprang.

Over a dozen Communication students joined recent grads KC Cowen (B.A., 2008) and Almeera Anwar (B.A., 2012) for a career chat over lunch. Cowen and Anwar met through the Association for Women in Communications (AWC) during their days as students and now both work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They landed their jobs through a temp agency, sharing with the students that this is an excellent avenue in an increasingly competitive job market. Each student walked away with a copy of an article recently posted on the UW Professional and Continuing Education site about how temporary or contract work functions.

Both Cowen and Anwar gave a straight talk about working for such an internationally recognized organization. At the beginning of each day, said Anwar, “it’s just a job” with all of the day-to-day tasks any job requires. She arrives at her cubicle, checks her email, gets a cup of coffee, goes back to her email, creates spreadsheets or communication pieces, or any number of tasks that she needs to do to help the people she works for do what they need to do, to help the people in the field do what they need to do in order to deliver the vaccines.

Not all nonprofits are the same. The Gates Foundation employees get a laptop and a smartphone – a great perk, but one that comes with the responsibility of being available to respond quickly and sometimes after regular work hours. The pace is fast at their job and they both love what they do. They stressed to the students to not assume that their first job out of college has to be a bad job. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” quoted Anwar.

“Being a soon-to-be graduate of the Communication department with a strong interest in global health, meeting with KC and Almeera was a huge benefit,” one student said. “What they do is right up my alley, and I was so happy to speak with them afterward. Because of the meeting, I now have an opportunity of speaking again with them in the near future.”

Another student said, “I learned many lessons and got several tips of how to behave in a professional manner. I just wished the meeting was longer, but I had to leave early to go to my next class.”

The career chat is part of our Communication Works! series, offering professional development events throughout the academic year.

About the mentors:

KC Cowen was recently promoted to Senior Assistant on the Global Health Financial Planning and Analysis Team. She is responsible for providing high-level support to the Global Health Program Chief Financial Officer. She previously worked as a Program Assistant on the Global Health HIV Team, responsible for team-wide coordination, event planning and relationship management with grantees and partners. Before the Gates Foundation, she was employed at the Medina Foundation, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and the University of Washington Office of Development and Alumni Relations. Cowen is a proud 2008 alumni of the University of Washington and owes her professional success to the connections and skills she developed as a student in the Department of Communication. She continues to give back by mentoring current Department of Communication students. In her free time, she enjoys walking Green Lake with her new husband Brian.

Almeera Anwar is a Program Assistant on Vaccine Delivery. While in college, she participated in the Dream Project, First Year Programs, Association for Women in Communications, Residence Hall Student Association, Associated Student, UW Leaders, and Relay for Life. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism & Anthropology. She did a Study Abroad in Switzerland, which was an intensive study on “Making Place: Tourism, Culture and Global Communication.” She considers herself an advocate for women and girls, education and cancer research. In her spare time she enjoys digging into a good book, trying out a recipe or exploring a new glass of wine with friends.