Kotzebue students, faculty members win journalism awards
May 5, 2016
Marmian Grimes
907-474-7902
Students and faculty members at the ¾Ã¾ÃÈÈÊÓƵ Chukchi ¾Ã¾ÃÈÈÊÓƵ
recently won several awards in the Alaska Professional Communicators’ annual contest.
Three students — Savannah Kramer, Deirdre Creed and Katherine Stein-Booth — received
first-place awards for stories published by the Alaska Dispatch News. Kramer’s story
addressed the danger of teenage cyber-stalking, even in the most remote reaches of
rural Alaska. Creed’s story chronicled a wrestling mishap at a statewide tournament
that landed her in the emergency room. Stein-Booth’s story explored human kindness
and compassion.
Three other students received second-place awards for their work: Mary Sue Hyatt,
for her story about a fall moose hunt; Joshua Roetman, for his story about one of
the nation’s toughest wrestling camps; and Gus Nelson, for his story about commercial
fishing in Kotzebue Sound.
The students wrote their winning pieces for a series that appeared in the Alaska Dispatch
News. They wrote the stories while participating in the Chukchi ¾Ã¾ÃÈÈÊÓƵ Honors Program,
which simultaneously awards high school and UAF college credits to students from the
Kotzebue-based Northwest Arctic Borough. The honors program was co-founded in the
late 1980s by English and journalism professors Susan Andrews and John Creed.
Andrews and Creed also won first-place awards as faculty journalism advisers and for their
overview of nearly three decades spent encouraging excellent writing from rural and
Alaska Native university students.