Author: hunter

Peter Carey, prize-winning novelist and executive director of Hunter’s MFA program in creative writing, has received yet another award – one that will make him a collector’s item. His homeland of Australia is issuing a stamp in his honor. Actually, two stamps, one with a photo of Carey from the 1970s and another with a contemporary image.

Carey is being honored along with five other Australian authors as part of a “Living Legends” stamp series. Asked for his reaction, he said, “To be on an Australian stamp is really quite moving. There’s a big part of me that really wants to be part of Australian culture.”

Carey is the author of several celebrated novels, including Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang and most recently Theft: A Love Story. He is one of only two novelists to have won the Booker Prize, one of the English language’s highest literary honors, twice.

When a reporter asked him how he felt about being designated a “legend,” Carey’s reply was characteristically witty and light-hearted: “‘Well, I’d say Donald Bradman [a revered Australian cricket player] was a legend, King Arthur, definitely a legend. I’m prepared to be a legend in my own lunchtime.’”

Daily News columnist Errol Louis will serve as the Jack Newfield Visiting Professor of Journalism this semester at Hunter College, offering a course in urban investigative journalism to selected students in the undergraduate Film and Media Studies Program and the graduate-level Integrated Media Arts Program.

“I’m delighted to be working with young filmmakers and journalists on a cutting-edge project,” said Louis, whose course is titled “Crime, Punishment and the Inner City: How to Stop Spinning the Revolving Door Between the Street Corner and the Prison.” In the course, he said, “We’re looking at the effect of mass incarceration on two New York City neighborhoods, Central Harlem and Hunts Point in the South Bronx. Our reporting will highlight the economic disruption, geographic displacement and social isolation that are the legacy of America’s fateful decision to use prisons as a one-size-fits all solution to society’s ills.”

The class offers an extraordinary opportunity to work with a leading journalist and to produce reporting that can make a real difference. It will offer students a crash course in reporting and interviewing techniques designed to get them up to professional standards quickly. The best work will be published in local media such as the Mott Haven Herald, The Hunts Point Express, the Amsterdam News, and the Black Star News. Audio reports suitable for broadcast will air on WWRL radio, and video interviews and essays will be published on a blog created for the class.

In his Daily News column, Louis writes on a wide range of political and social issues. He also hosts The Morning Show on radio station WWRL, where his guests have included Gov. David Paterson, former President Jimmy Carter, filmmaker Michael Moore, and author Cornel West. Formerly an associate editor of The New York Sun, he has taught college courses, co-founded an inner-city community credit union, and run for City Council.

Inaugurated in 2006, the Jack Newfield Professorship honors the legendary reporter and Hunter graduate (BA ’60) by bringing a distinguished journalist to Hunter each spring semester to teach and mentor students and continue the tradition of investigative journalism that Newfield represented. Newfield began his journalism career as sports editor of the school newspaper, the Hunter Arrow, then developed his reputation as a crusading journalist as a reporter for the Village Voice, and went on to report for the Daily News, the New York Post, and the New York Sun.

“I opened the first class,” said Errol Louis, “by talking about my mentor and friend Jack Newfield, who is fondly remembered in newsrooms around the city as a man unafraid to tackle tough issues, complex stories and entrenched power. I think he would get a kick out of the work our class is doing.”

Hunter College junior Jeffrey Ruiz was chosen as the student representative at the launch of the Malaysia Global Model U.N. Program 2010 (GMUN 2010), which will take place this summer.

In addition, Ruiz has been named a co-chair of the Program Committee for GMUN 2010, along with another Hunter junior, Christine Batilloro. Ruiz and Batilloro are both head delegates on the Hunter College Model U.N. Team. Ruiz was chosen for his new post at a meeting held earlier this month at U.N. headquarters in New York.

More than a thousand top-level college and university students from all over the world are expected to attend the Global Model United Nations Conference in Malaysia, which is part of the U.N. effort to encourage young people to strive on behalf of peace and development. The aim of the Malaysia meeting is to build on the success of the inaugural Global Model U.N. Conference, held in Geneva last summer.

Emphasizing the importance of the Model U.N. meetings, Kiyo Akasaka, U.N. undersecretary-general for communications and public information, stressed that “It is crucial to engage young people.”

Added Ruiz, “As students we study law, theory, the sciences, and history, “but we rarely have the opportunity to apply what we learn in order to come up with innovative solutions to the problems facing people the world over—such as extreme poverty, nuclear disarmament, epidemics, and, as we have recently seen, terrible natural disaster. Model United Nations brings students as close to hands-on work as one can get in trying to draft plausible solutions and to experience the indispensable value of dialogue and compromise.”

Hunter’s Model United Nations Team has competed at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Oxford, and has consistently won honors. Most members of the team are students in Hunter’s Model U.N. class, a political science course taught by Professor Pamela Falk, who also serves as advisor to the team.

Tina Chang, Hunter adjunct professor of English, has been chosen over 21 other applicants to become Brooklyn’s next poet laureate.  Borough President Marty Markowitz announced the news in his State of the Borough address on February 3, citing Chang’s many literary accolades and her commitment to becoming a “poetic ambassador.”  At the event, Chang read her poem “Praise.”

Chang is the author of the collection Half-Lit Houses and co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond.

On Sunday, March 7, Hunter Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning Peter Kwong will be at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, where he hopes to find himself on stage after the announcement of the winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject).  Among the category’s five nominees is a film he co-produced: “China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province.”

“China’s Unnatural Disaster” looks at the devastating aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that killed at least 70,000 people, including thousands of children crushed by school buildings.  The film follows parents coming to terms with their loss and challenging government officials to explain the inadequate construction.

“It’s about heroic people struggling to find justice and about the larger demand for political reform in China,” said Kwong.  “We want the government to be accountable.”

In fact, the government has attempted to suppress the movie and the news of its Oscar nomination.  Kwong and his co-producers were themselves previously detained in China and have since had their visas denied.  For Kwong, the value of the Oscar nomination, and hopeful win, goes far beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood prestige.

“We are pleased that this film will finally get another chance for viewership,” he said.

Hunter College observed a milestone on January 21 – its 200^th commencement exercise. Exuberant families and friends filled Assembly Hall for the historic ceremony at which 1,300 degrees and certificates were conferred.

Commencement speaker Kerry Kennedy was quickly caught up in the spirit of the occasion, breaking off at one point from her prepared text speech to tell the enthusiastic audience, “I love this crowd – you’re just great.”

Kennedy is one of the nation’s foremost human rights activists. She established the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights in 1988 in memory of her late father, and she has led more than 40 human rights delegations around the globe. Drawing on her long experience as an activist, Kennedy urged the graduating students to always remember that “determined people can change the world.”

She spoke of her own first job after graduating from Brown, an internship at Amnesty International. “I found myself surrounded by Davids who stood up against a world of Goliaths,” she said. “They were armed only with determination, but they never stopped fighting to make the dream of human rights come true.”

She noted how far the world has come since the dark days of the 1970s and ’80s when the Soviet Union was intact, dictators dominated Latin America and South Africa was ruled by an apartheid regime. Now, she said with evident pride, 183 nations have approved CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination).

But despite such gains, she said, millions of people around the world are still denied their basic rights. “The struggle goes on,” she concluded. “We all have to speak out against injustice.”