Vote Kakenya Ntaiya for the top CNN Hero

Kakenya Ntaiya ’04 is one of the top ten CNN Heroes of 2013. Beginning today, the Randolph College community and others who admire her work can vote daily to make her the top CNN Hero for the year.

Ntaiya is a member of a Massai tribe from Kenya. She convinced her village leaders to allow her to be the first girl to leave and attend college in the United States. After graduating from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and receiving a doctoral degree, she returned to Kenya to open a boarding school where girls are receiving an education that empowers their lives.

To vote, visit the CNN Heroes voting page and select Ntaiya’s picture. Complete the voting by entering an e-mail address or logging in with a Facebook account. Each person may vote once per day. Voting will continue until November 17.

Winning the top CNN Hero award would provide $250,000 to grow the school and transform the lives of more girls, Ntaiya said in an e-mail to supporters. “I want to thank CNN for believing in my dream and that of the many girls around the world,” she wrote. “And I want to thank you, our supporters, for your continued support. Together we are changing the lives of girls in Kenya in a positive way.”

Learn more about Ntaiya here on CNN’s feature page about her.

Recent graduate gets book contract for stories she wrote at Randolph

A collection of short stories written by Sara Taylor ’12 for her senior project at Randolph will be published soon.

Taylor recently signed a contract to publish the collection with Random House Publishers imprints in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. She will spend the next six months working with editors to prepare the book for publication (while also studying for her Ph.D.).

Taylor, an English major with an emphasis in creative writing, started working on the collection the summer before her senior year at Randolph when she decided that she wanted to complete an honors project. “I was told that honors meant 100 pages minimum and no maximum,” she said. “I figured that if I was going to write that much, I might as well write a whole book.”

English professor Bunny Goodjohn, Taylor’s senior advisor, provided guidance and challenged Taylor to perfect the stories’ plots, characters, and language. “Working with her was one of the best experiences of my entire time at Randolph,” Taylor said. Their work brought rewards before long: one of the stories from Taylor’s senior project won the coveted Stony Brook Short Fiction Prize last year.

Goodjohn already knew that Taylor was a talented writer, but seeing her senior project come together taught her something else about her student. “She was also a dogged writer—fully committed to learning two other skills a modern writer needs: self-promotion and marketing,” she said. “Sara knew it wasn’t enough to sit down and write; she had to take control not only of craft but also of her own publishing success.”

Most stories in the volume take place in a fictionalized version of Eastern Shore, a region on a peninsula on Virginia’s eastern coast where she lived when she started writing the stories.

While studying for her master’s degree at the University of East Anglia (UEA) last year, she met a literary agent who started marketing the book. The agent called with frequent updates, and she finally had good news a few weeks ago.

“She called me to say that there was no news, and then she had to leave because she was getting a call. Then she called back and said an offer had been made,” Taylor said. “By the end of the evening I had a publisher.”

The book is currently titled The Shore, but that might change as the book is prepared for publication. It will be about 360 pages and will appear in hardcover and paperback. It is scheduled to hit bookstore shelves in 2015.

“I still can’t believe it’s happened,” Taylor said. “It’s given me a lot more energy to do the next book.”

Her next major project is a novel that she started during her master’s program. She would like to be a professional writer, but she also plans to look for opportunities to teach after completing her Ph.D. at UEA.

Candy Crowley ’70 takes strong role in presidential debate

Alumna Candy Crowley ’70 shined before a national audience Tuesday night as she moderated the second presidential debate of the 2012 election cycle. For more than 90 minutes, she guided a conversation between President Barack Obama, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and an audience of undecided voters at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y.

Crowley, CNN’s chief political correspondent and anchor of State of the Union with Candy Crowley, was tasked with moderating a town hall presidential debate—a challenging format that requires the moderator to manage questions from the audience, answers from the candidates, and any verbal sparring that results as the candidates clash.

Crowley made a strong showing in the debate after some feared that her role, as the first woman to moderate a presidential debate in 20 years, would be limited to inviting audience members to ask their questions. Although both presidential campaigns had agreed not to allow her to pose her own questions, she inserted herself into the debate, forcing each candidate to address issues in the questions and reigning in the discussion when it strayed far from the intended topics.

That power came in part because of her decision to stand during the debate, although initial plans would have given her a chair. “It is so hard to take command of a stage when you’re sitting down and they’re towering over you,” she said in a post-debate interview on CNN. “When I came in and saw this stage, I said, I want to stand. I want to stand up so we’re on the same level.”

When a question about gas prices turned into a debate about overall energy policy, Crowley directed the President back to the central question. “I can tell you that tomorrow morning, a lot of people in Hempstead will wake up and fill up, and they will find that the price of gas is over $4 a gallon,” Crowley said. “Is it within the purview of the government to bring those prices down, or are we looking at the new normal?”

Later, when Romney charged that Obama had blamed the Sept. 11 attacks against the American consulate in Libya on an Internet video instead of calling it a terrorist attack, Crowley helped to move the conversation forward by adding clarification. “(Obama) did call it an act of terror,” she told Romney. “It did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea of there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about that.”

One of the teenagers who led an effort to ask the Commission on Presidential Debates to select a woman as a moderator this year praised Crowley for a strong performance in the debate. Emma Axelrod wrote for the Poynter Institute:

In my life, I never saw a woman on that stage acting as an authority over the two most potentially powerful men in America. That is, until Tuesday night. … Crowley was a great choice. I loved her follow-ups and thought she did a sound job of keeping the candidates under control.

After the debate, Crowley appeared in late night and early morning shows to talk about the experience and analyze the outcomes of the event. Although her schedule is currently dominated with election coverage, Crowley and the College are working to schedule a visit to campus so she can share insights with current Randolph students.

Katelin Shugart-Schmidt wins Virginia Tech Graduate Woman of the Year award

A 2010 alumna has won a prestigious award in graduate school at Virginia Tech.

Katelin Shugart-Schmidt was named Virginia Tech’s Graduate Woman of the Year. The annual award recognizes students who are deeply involved in the graduate community, contribute new knowledge through their research and teaching, and demonstrate a commitment to diversity.

Shugart-Schmidt said she was honored to receive the award, and that she traces her success in graduate school back to her undergraduate days. “It all came out of my experiences at Randolph,” she said.

Shugart-Schmidt, from Logan, Utah, majored in environmental science and minored in mathematics and biology during her time at the College. She participated in several research opportunities, including a summer internship with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She went to Hawaii to study algae blooms, coral reefs, and conservation efforts on Waikiki beach. For that project, she won Best Oral Student Presenter at the Hawaii Conservation Conference in Honolulu.

She also held leadership roles in Randolph’s honor system, which opened doors for her to be involved in the Virginia Tech honor system. She now serves as chief justice in that program.

Today, Shugart-Schmidt is studying methods for predicting how fishing regulations will affect fish populations, considering variables such as the weather and gas prices. She hopes to graduate in December. After graduation, she wants to help make conservation policies become more effective.

“I would really like to work in the intersection between policy and science,” she said. “I would love to take scientific information and translate that into a language that our policy makers and managers can understand and deal with correctly.”