Showing posts with label career. Show all posts
Showing posts with label career. Show all posts

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Career: Lynn Sherr, Broadcast Journalist and Author


2015 National Women’s History Month Honorees

Meet Broadcast Journalist and Author Lynn Sherr
 March is National Women’s History Month.  2015 is the National Women’s History Project’s  35th Anniversary.  In celebration of this landmark anniversary, we have chosen 9 women as 2015 Honorees who have contributed in very special ways to our work of “writing women back into history.”  
Today we feature honoree Lynn Sherr, broadcast (TV) journalist and author, whose articles on historic trailblazing women chronicle those brave women who broke ground for today's women.

Lynn Sherr (1943- Present) 
Broadcast Journalist and Author
lynn signing Sally book (4)
The modern women’s rights movement has brought about the greatest
social change in our lifetime.  It woke me up, gave me purpose focused my
energy…I joined a growing number of twentieth-century feminist determined
 to set the record straight and prove definitively that the same bold women
who had blazed the trails deserved our unmitigated thanks.  
Lynn Sherr
Lynn Sherr, an American  broadcast journalist and author, began her career at Conde Nast, when she won the Mademoiselle Magazine Guest Editor Competition in college.  She soon moved on to the Associated Press, then WCBS-TV,  PBS, and ultimately ABC, where she covered politics, space and social change for more than 30 years.  As a correspondent for the ABC news magazine 20/20, she received many honors, including the George Foster Peabody Award in 1994 for “The Hunger Inside,” about anorexia. 
For over a decade,  Sherr along with Jurate  Kazickas created The Women’s Appointment Calendar, a day-by-day recollection of women’s historic events. The calendars are fun-filled, primary source documents of women’s history before and during the second wave of the 20th century women’s movement.
Sherr is an unabashed feminist who has twice been the recipient of the Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award, honoring journalists for “exceptional coverage of reproductive rights and health care issues.”  She has rejected calls for a “new feminism,” remarking, “What’s wrong with the old feminism?”
In Susan B. Anthony Slept Here (1976), Sherr recognized the importance of reclaiming and visiting women’s historic landmarks.  Her latest best-selling book, Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space (2014), is the only adult biography of that pathbreaking woman.  Sherr’s career on and off TV is courageously chronicled in Outside the Box: A Memoir (2006).
This article is courtesy of the National Women's History Project

Monday, September 16, 2013

Career: Barbara Chiles, Teacher and Coach


It's that time of year when many of us are back to school
and hitting the books (or laptops or e-readers).
I bet there are teachers who have influenced your life in a good way.



Barbara Chiles, after a grueling climb, reached the top of Long's Peak in Colorado

Barbara Chiles, also known as "Chili," certainly was determined to become a teacher because she admired her innovative physical education (P.E.) teacher, Mrs. Kreiter.  Due to Mrs. K’s encouragement Barbara became a gym teacher and developed her own resourceful ideas and creative teaching methods.
Chili, wearing the hat, at a girls residence camp when she was a girl.
At her school in Illinois, very little money was available to purchase new equipment and to repair the old. Barbara thought of a way to repair the broken strings in the badminton racquets at no cost to the school.  She asked the kids to bring in their moms’ old panty hose.  She showed the students how to pull a leg of the panty hose tightly over the badminton racquet head and duct tape it down to the handle. It worked.  The badminton birdies bounced beautifully off the panty hose!
It was this “get ‘er done” attitude that helped Barbara become the school’s athletic director. She was the first female high school athletic director in Illinois in charge of both boys and girls athletics.
Barbara loved her job as athletic director scheduling games and overseeing the athletic programs. She developed the physical education program for her school and for the State of Illinois. She created one of the first wilderness survival programs in the country.
The idea to establish the Challenges Unlimited Club for her students came to Barbara while she was sitting on top of Long’s Peak, a 14,000 foot mountain in the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.  Climbing that difficult mountain terrain was a challenge for her. After reaching the top, she felt the excitement of the achievement.  Barbara decided she wanted her students to have that same feeling of accomplishment. When she returned to school, she asked the students to choose big goals to challenge them.  Some decided to train to do 10,000 cartwheels or bike one hundred miles in a day.  Some worked toward goals in swimming, dancing, and more. When the kids achieved their objectives, they were thrilled and ready to set new challenges for the next school year.
“Success is a journey, not a destination,” said Barbara.  “Get all the experience you can.  No one starts on top.  Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something.”

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Do you have a teacher who influenced your life? Please take a minute to tell us about her in the comment area below. Thank you.

Find out more about this trailblazing and influential teacher in the e-book for girls, Girls Succeed: Stories Behind the Careers of Successful Women.

Inspiring and empowering girls to achieve the career of their dreams.
Here are the links to download a sample and contents or to buy a copy:



Study Guide is also available to accompany the book.

Study guide Smashwords Link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/275371
Study guide Amazon Link http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B27S4H6




 


Monday, August 19, 2013

Career: YA Author Kaitlin Bevis on Writing as a Career

Welcome YA author Kaitlin Bevis to the Girls Succeed blog! Kaitlin and I are swapping blogs today, so please hop on over to Kaitlin's blog to visit us there and leave a comment. Thank you!

Image of Kaitlin Bevis

Kaitlin Bevis spent her childhood curled up with a book, and a pen. If the ending didn't agree with her, she rewrote it. She's always wanted to be a writer, and spent high school and college learning everything she could so that one day she could achieve that goal. She graduated college with a BFA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing, and is pursuing her masters at the University of Georgia.
Her young adult series "Daughters of Zeus" is available wherever ebooks are sold. She also writes for truuconfessions.com and Athens Parent Magazine.
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Today Kaitlin shares her lifelong passion for writing with us. Do you enjoy writing stories? Maybe you and Kaitlin share similar experiences.
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Writing by Kaitlin Bevis
I've been writing all my life. Before I could read I called it make believe, but the same basic components were there. Plotting, developing characters, dialogue. It's all there,

I developed much of my writing style through reading. I would read my books with a black marker and a pen in hand, so I could change anything I didn't like. If the next book wasn't coming out soon enough, I'd create my own version.

I did that with shows too. As soon as Sailor Moon went off I'd start acting out the next episode. I was so proud of myself, because I was almost always right.

Took me awhile to realize the show had a rather repetitive formula...

While I was in middle school I wrote my first book. It was terrible. I still have it on a floppy disk, and I'm too terrified to open the file because it was that bad. In high school I was able to take creative writing classes and learned how to critique the work of my peers.

I enjoyed writing so much that when I ran out of creative writing classes in high school, I begged my school councilor to let me take it at the college through joint enrollment. In the summer between eleventh and twelfth grade I took English 1101 and 1102. During my senior year I took introduction to creative writing, advanced fiction writing, advanced non fiction writing, advanced poetry writing, and screenplay writing. The next year I took my core classes and even more creative writing classes. Including autobiographical writing, science fiction and fantasy writing, technical writing, and every other writing class I could find. Once I ran out I moved to Atlanta to get an English degree with a concentration in creative writing. I'm finishing up my masters now, and am applying to the Phd program with a creative writing dissertation.

Despite my lifetime commitment to writing, my personal writing didn't really take off until I joined my writers group. I was familiar with the workshop format through my schooling, but there's something different about a group of people who willingly spend Saturday nights away from their family and friends to talk about their writing that just can't be replicated in a classroom.

I'm very excited for my first book, Persephone, to be released. It's been a long journey to publication, and I can't really tell when it started. Did it begin when I penned my first draft? Or was it in college when I was learning everything I could about writing? Was it before then when I was acting out the next episode of Sailor Moon? Each of those little moments were important because of where they led. Now my book is out of my hands and into the readers.

Time to start the next one.
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Persephone, Daughter of Zeus

Back of the Book: 

The "talk" was bad enough, but how many teens get told that they're a goddess? When her mom tells her, Persephone is sure her mother has lost her mind. It isn't until Boreas, the god of winter, tries to abduct her that she realizes her mother was telling the truth. Hades rescues her, and in order to safely bring Persephone to the Underworld he marks her as his bride. But Boreas will stop at nothing to get Persephone. Despite her growing feelings for Hades, Persephone wants to return to the living realm. Persephone must find a way to defeat Boreas and reclaim her life.

Reviews 
Musa
Amazon
Kobo:


Available at all major online booksellers. 


Connect with Kaitlin online: 
Email: kaitlinbevis@gmail.com
Blog
Twitter: @kaitlinbevis



Sunday, May 19, 2013

Career: Singer/Songwriter Taylor Swift's Dream


Congratulations to Taylor Swift for winning 
8 Billboard Awards!!

Taylor Swift photo-Taylor Swift.com

Singer/songwriter Taylor Swift began singing at two years old. Yeah, really. Who knew that toddler would become an international, beloved role model and award-winning entertainer selling millions of albums?

Taylor had a dream. She wanted to be a singer and kept the dream alive by working hard and believing in herself. She developed her musical talent and loved sharing her music with her friends and family and eventually with all her fans.

Find out more about Taylor Swift and her music at the Taylor Swift website. 


Monday, November 26, 2012

Sharon Loving: A Career in Horticulture

Sharon Loving, Head of the Horticulture Department at Longwood Gardens
The word, horticulture, may be a big word to you. Horticulture means the science of cultivating or nurturing plants and flowers. The woman in charge of the horticulture department at Longwood Gardens has a big job as well as a big word to describe her job. Sharon Loving is a horticulturalist, someone who nurtures flowers and plants.

Sharon enjoyed digging in the dirt and growing flowers when she was a girl. She has succeeded in developing her passion for plants into her full-time job. When she was a little girl planting, watering, weeding, and mulching her flower beds in her yard, she had no idea she would one day be in charge of acres of display gardens at the world-renowned Longwood Gardens located near the city of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

Sharon, on the right, didn't know when she was a girl she would be working right here at Longwood Gardens. Pictured in front of one of the fantastic fountains in the display garden.
She is responsible for producing and maintaining quality horticultural displays and landscapes for the entire property. She has the joyful job of overseeing the displays of hundreds of colorful mum plants during the Chrysanthemum Festival in the fall and all of the magnificent Christmas decorations during the holidays.
Poinsettia, the Christmas flower
There's a lot of preparation for the Longwood Gardens Annual Christmas displays. Workers set up seventy-seven lighted trees and string up 500,000 holiday lights outdoors. Inside the glass conservatory which is a greenhouse area, Sharon and the staff decorate gorgeous Christmas trees. Thousands of colorful poinsettias, which are traditional Christmas-time plants, and other beautiful flowering plants offer eye-candy for the plant lovers.

Sharon Loving is one of the successful women featured in the interactive e-book, Girls Succeed: Stories Behind the Careers of Successful Women available now at Amazon and Smashwords.

Now sit back and enjoy a peek at the Christmas splendor Sharon and her staff creates.