Kotzebue students, faculty members win journalism awards
May 5, 2016
Marmian Grimes
907-474-7902
Students and faculty members at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Chukchi Campus
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 College 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.