writer. In 2002, she was named to Who’s Who in American Writers and Poets; and in 2004, she won the Eugenia Price Award for Excellence in Writing. Today Sharon leads a writer’s critique group, and contributes to the Harbour Sound. hen Emily Chase Cook ’70 was in third or fourth grade in Huntsville, Alabama, she started a neighborhood newspaper that she sold for a nickel. A close family friend was the publisher of the Huntsville Times and, as far back as she can remember, Emily wanted to write for the newspaper. She thought she would study journalism in college, then found out the Times editor was not a fan of journalism schools. He advised Emily to get the very best liberal arts education she could possibly get and then he would train her to put out a newspaper.
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journalism courses. Those courses were the early stages of what is now Wesleyan’s communications department. Despite major transitions in the media industry from print to television to online content, Emily claims that she has always preferred a printed newspaper but said, “I am lucky to have worked through some remarkable changes in technology.” efore leaving her home in Florida to attend Wesleyan, Jeanne Norton Rollberg ’79 intended to prepare for law school. She majored in history but then switched her focus to a career in journalism and earned a master’s degree at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1980. Today, Jeanne is an associate professor of journalism in the School of Mass Communication at University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR ) where she has taught since 1983.
Emily looked at several small, Southern women’s colleges including Sweetbriar, Agnes Scott, and Randolph Macon, but fell in love with Wesleyan. Soon after, she fell in love with her future husband and never returned to her Huntsville newspaper aspirations. After graduating with a degree in English, Emily applied for a job at The Macon Telegraph. “They asked me where my journalism degree was,” Emily laughed. With help from mentor Blythe McKay, society editor for the Macon Evening News, Emily began writing feature articles for The Telegraph. She worked full-time for three years and then part-time while her children were young. Over the course of thirtyfive years, Emily wrote several columns including 50 Years Ago and Southern Sunday and also was editor of The Telegraph’s Neighbors tab. She is best known for Strictly Social, a society column about the comings and goings of Macon’s social elite.
During her tenure at UALR, Jeanne has served as interim director of the School of Mass Communication and as chair of the department of journalism. Last spring, Jeanne was selected by a national panel of judges as winner of UALRs $5,000 University Faculty Excellence Award for Public Service sponsored by Bank of America. In 2005, the Arkansas Press Association named her the state’s Outstanding Journalism Educator of the Year.
During the 1980s, Emily served as an adjunct professor at Wesleyan and taught introductory and intermediate
Through the years, she has served as president, vice president, secretary, and a board member of the Arkansas chapter of
Before joining the UALR faculty, Jeanne was an instructor at Texas A&M and the news director of KAMU-TV/FM in College Station. Although her teaching responsibilities were demanding once she joined the UALR faculty, she continued to work as a part-time television reporter in Little Rock and spent ten years producing news and public affairs programming on KLRE/KUARFM for which she won many national and state awards.
the Society of Professional Journalists. She served two terms on the board of directors of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, the largest organization of electronic journalists in the world. She also was head of the RadioTV Journalism Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the nation’s largest organization of educators in mass communication. Colleagues say Jeanne’s service is uniquely relevant to a metropolitan campus. She was the first UALR professor to serve at the Clinton School of Public Service where she helped shape a public image for the school, conducted market research, edited the newsletter, and played a key role in admissions. She also assisted the office of development in setting up a scholarship for minority students funded by KTHV-TV and Hola! Arkansas. hough she doesn’t make her living as a writer, Kathy A. Bradley ’78 hopes that one day she will. “Writing, at this point at least, is an avocation or, in better words, my passion,” she said. For the past ten and a half years, Kathy has been an assistant district attorney for the Ogeechee Judicial Circuit of Georgia and the sole juvenile prosecutor on a nine-lawyer staff covering four counties. But in 1996, she began writing a bi-weekly column for the Statesboro Herald, where the parameters of content are left totally up to her. Her column appears in the Sunday Lifestyles section and usually focuses on topics like family and friends, life on a farm, the exploration of nature, and spiritual themes. She also maintains a blog that often features variations of her newspaper columns. The blog greets its readers with these words: “You have arrived at Sandhill, a tiny speck in the coastal plains of southeast Georgia. Whether your arrival is by invitation, navigation or accident, you are welcome.”
Fans of her columns often invite Kathy to speak at various church and civic events. She is a favorite among Wesleyan students and has delivered the opening convocation address and the Baccalaureate Marker Ceremony speech. Kathy served as President of Wesleyan’s Alumnae Association from 1991-1994, and then served a three-year term as Alumna Trustee. “I have always been a writer,” Kathy said, “though it took me years and years to actually call myself that. It was easy to identify myself as an attorney because I had ‘credentials.’ To use the term ‘writer’ to describe myself, however, seemed a bit braggadocious.” In high school Kathy wrote poetry and was on the staff of her school’s creative magazine. She was the editor of the Wesleyan Magazine as a senior and was elected to membership in the Scribes honor society. Through blogs, speeches, and other projects, Kathy’s writing continues to evolve. Three years ago, she recorded a CD reading a year’s worth of columns for a friend who was losing his eyesight and was no longer able to read. She decided to manufacture enough CDs to sell and entitled it Dispatches from Sandhill. Also, in 2009, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition broadcast a StoryCorps interview of Kathy talking to her father, Johnny Bradley, about his life growing up in Georgia as the son of a sharecropper. StoryCorps is an independent non-profit organization and its interviews are produced in conjunction with the Library of Congress where all StoryCorps interviews are archived. Inspired by Wesleyan alumnae and personal friends Julia Stillwell Ketcham ’58 and Kathryn Stripling Byer ’66, Kathy views her writing as “not just art and certainly not just craft, but soul.” She said, “It is the tangible expression of myself that I offer to the world.”