Summary of Madison Activities
In Spring 2019, Tracy Lucht (Iowa State University) moderated a discussion about media representations and gender. This discussion, entitled, “The Power of Portrayals in a Wired World,” featured Barbara Glickstein (Center for Health Policy and Media Engagement at George Washington University School of Nursing), Kem Knapp Sawyer (Pulitzer Center), Linda Steiner (University of Maryland) and Negassi Tesfamichael (The Cap Times). Over 200 people attended this online discussion.
Kem’s Biography
Kem Knapp Sawyer is an editor at the Pulitzer Center and director of its Campus Consortium Reporting Fellow Program. She has reported on children at risk in Congo, Haiti, Bangladesh, and India. Sawyer co-authored Congo’s Children, a Pulitzer Center e-book, with Jon Sawyer, her husband and the Pulitzer Center’s executive director.
Her books for young readers include Grace Akallo and the Pursuit of Justice for Child Soldiers, Refugees: Seeking a Safe Haven, The Underground Railroad in American History, and biographies of Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi, Anne Frank, Lucretia Mott, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Her feature stories and book reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Christian Science Monitor, Scholastic News, Cobblestone, and The Five Owls. She is also a contributor to the Dorling Kindersley (DK) Eyewitness Travel Guides.
Sawyer attended Yale University, where she majored in English and French and produced theater for children. She has taught creative dramatics in elementary schools and English and drama in high school. She also taught writing in the bachelor of fine arts program at the Corcoran College of Art + Design for 15 years before joining the Pulitzer Center.
The Sawyers have three grown daughters—and a dog named Shadow.