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Alumnae Relations
Hollins University
P.O. Box 9629
Roanoke, VA 24020-1629
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alumnae@hollins.edu

Alumnae Accomplishments

	Liana Camper-Barry '09 (who writes under the name Liana Quill) is the latest Hollins alumna to earn a prestigious writing award. Camper-Barry has been named a winner of the first Mississippi Review Poetry Series contest. Her poetry collection, Fifty Poems, is one of three books selected for publication in January 2010. She competed against poets from across the country for the award, which also includes a $1,000 cash prize. "I am so happy for Liana I am beside myself, and this is a big honor for our undergraduate creative writing program as well," said Professor of English R.H.W. Dillard. "She is certainly the youngest Hollins alumna to have a 'real' book published since possibly Anna Sevier in 1963 and Lee Smith in 1968." Dillard added that Camper-Barry will also have a selection of 15 poems from the book published in the next issue of Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts, for which he is writing an introduction. The Mississippi Review Poetry Series contest was judged by award-winning poet Dara Wier, who has authored 11 books of poetry and directs the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
	Lee Smith ’67 has been awarded Chowan University's Hobson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters, which is given each year by the Hobson Family Foundation as a memorial to Mary Francis Hobson, a journalist and poet, who was the first woman to receive the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award in journalism from the University of North Carolina. Smith has published 11 novels and three collections of short stories over the past 40 years. Her 2001 novel The Last Girls, based on a Mississippi River journey she took as a Hollins student, was a New York Times bestseller, a "Good Morning America" Book Club selection, and co-winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. On Agate Hill, her latest book, spans life in the South from Reconstruction through the Roaring Twenties and has received wide acclaim.
	President Obama has appointed Pamela J.H. Slutz '70 as Ambassador to the Republic of Burundi. Read more from the White House press release. Slutz is a career member of the Foreign Service, and was formerly U.S. Ambassador to Mongolia. She has also served as Deputy Director of the American Institute in Taiwan, chief of the political section in Jakarta, director of the Office of Regional and Security Policy in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and deputy director of the Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs. Earlier in her career, she was a political officer in Shanghai, Jakarta and Kinshasa, and served in the Bureau of Political Military Affairs and as a member of the U.S. Delegation to the Nuclear and Space Talks with the USSR.
	The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that The Nature Conservancy's Mobile Bay Oyster Reef Restoration project will receive support from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to create jobs and restore coastal habitats in south Mobile County, Alabama. Mary Austill Lott '00 is Coastal Programs Director at the Nature Conservancy of Alabama, and leads the restoration project. "The immediate impact of this funding will be the creation of 35 to 40 new jobs, primarily construction jobs, in Bayou La Batre," said Lott. "These jobs will make it possible to enhance fisheries - and, in turn, local communities - that have been hard hit by Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina, as well as by drought and economic strife."
	Valer Clark Austin ’62 was featured in an online video at Washingtonpost.com about her environmental work on the U.S.-Mexico border. At Reunion 2007, Austin shared photos and stories of her inspiring work on preserving and restoring the biodiversity of the borderland region between the United States and Mexico, and a story on her work was in the summer 2007 HOLLINS magazine.
	Nicole Harrell '96 is the recipient of the 2009 Walter E. Hoffman Community Service Award from the Norfolk and Portsmouth Bar Association. The award is presented to a young member of the association for outstanding service to the community. Harrell has two dogs that are certified through Therapy Dogs International. The dogs work for a program called PAWS for Reading that she helped start at Nansemond-Suffolk Academy, where first- and second-grade children read aloud to the dogs to improve the children’s skills and self-confidence. As the pro bono coordinator for Kaufman & Canoles, Harrell coordinates training sessions for attorneys to take protective order cases for victims of violence. She is hoping to work with the Norfolk and Portsmouth Bar Association and with the Young Lawyers Division of the Virginia Bar Association to expand the program to Hampton Roads.
	Ruth Foster '03 has had her senior honors thesis for the International Studies major translated into Arabic and published by the Cadmus Press in Damascus. The journey from thesis to publication began in 2002 when she went to Egypt during January Term to work on an archaeological project in Thebes, directed by John Darnell, Professor of Egyptology at Yale. During her time there, she became quite interested in the issue of the treatment of animals in Egypt and did field work in Luxor, Cairo, and a small village near Thebes. She then wrote her thesis, titled "The Treatment of Animals in Egypt from Pharaonic to Modern Times." A few years later, by chance, Simon Samoeil, the curator librarian of the Near East collection at Yale, heard about Foster’s thesis. He encouraged her to submit it to a publisher in the Arab/Islamic world for possible translation into Arabic, believing her findings and conclusions would be of great interest to readers of Arabic. Cadmus Press is one of the major publishers of scholarly Arabic books.
	Beth Macy M.A. '93 has been named one of 24 fellows by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. She will spend the 2009-2010 academic year at Harvard University. During her fellowship, Macy will be able to take classes, attend seminars, and participate in other special events. Macy has been a reporter at The Roanoke Times since 1989. Her work on immigrant communities has won national awards, including a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism and inclusion in The Best Newspaper Writing, 2007-2008 Edition. She has taught journalism at Hollins and written freelance articles for Salon.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Christian Science Monitor. She has covered the families beat for the past two and a half years of her 20-year career at The Roanoke Times and intends to continue the work she started with last year’s award-winning “Age of Uncertainty” series, which detailed the impact of the aging population and the crisis in long-term care. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University has awarded mid-career fellowships to more than 1,300 journalist from 89 countries since 1938. It is the oldest such program for journalists in the world.
	In an interview on WRAL.com (N.C.) in March 2009, Sadie Tillery '05 spoke on behalf of this year's Full Frame Documentary, to be held in April in Durham, North Carolina. Tillery is director of programming for the festival, now in its twelfth year. This year's theme, "This Sporting Life," attracted 1,200 submissions, of which 100 were accepted for the festival.
	The short story, "Magic Words" written by Jill McCorkle M.A. '81, has been chosen for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2009 and also has been selected for New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2009. It was also chosen as one of the top five stories of the Best of the Net in 2008. "Magic Words" is from her new story collection, Going Away Shoes.
	In February 2009, Jamilyn Cole '00 left North Carolina for Uganda, where she will be living for the next 6-12 months working for the UNITE project of the North Carolina Zoo, as a conservation education trainer. Jamilyn is living in the small village of Bigodi, Uganda which is on the perimeter of Kibale National Forest. She provides training and materials to teachers in eight schools that boarder the National Forest, to aid them in the development of environmental and conservation curricula and activities. You can follow Jamilyn's adventures on her blog.