Classnotes

November 2022

Karen Ali '92 recently released A Woman's Guide to Understanding Men: Dating Secrets Most Women Don't Know, a book exploring the dating differences between men and women based on research drawn from hundreds of interviews with men– including several J-School classmates. Her book, written under the pen name Kareena Alexander, is a guide for smart, successful women conquering the world in every area of their life, except their personal lives. 

Caroline Howard ’01 was recently promoted to executive editor at Forbes. She is responsible for newsroom strategy, innovation and operations as well as multimedia storytelling. She’s a co-founding editor of the prestigious 30 Under 30 franchise and edit lead from 2011 to 2018, as well as director of the annual Top Colleges ranking and the Inclusive Capitalism and Journalist Entrepreneur Initiatives for 2021. She joined Forbes in 2009 after working as a contributing correspondent for People beginning in 2001, and is spending the pandemic photographing the changing seasons in Fort Tryon Park, learning Italian, and writing short stories based on mosaics in the National Bardo Museum in Tunisia.

Nada El Sawy ‘02 has become The National’s Cairo correspondent after working 2 years for the publications personal finance section as a business reporter. Prior to joining The National’s team, Nada worked as a freelance journalist in Dubai, covering everything from business to education to social issues. Nada has contributed to international publications including, The New York Times, Newsweek Magazine, and The Financial Times, as well as local media. 

Kerry Sheridan ‘02 has recently been working on Class of COVID-19, a collaboration with Florida Public Media journalists reporting on the current state of Florida public education in the wake of the pandemic. Sheridan contributed a 12 minute audio feature to Class of COVID-19 on the women who search for the children of migrant farmworkers near the strawberry fields east of Tampa, and try to enroll them in school. The series was edited by WLRN’s Alicia Zuckerman ‘01. Alongside her work with Class of COVID-19, Sheridan is a reporter and host of All Things Considered at WUSF public media; her most recent story, working alongside Columbia Alums Veronica Zaragovia ‘08 and Lance Dixon ’13, dealt with interviewing Florida migrant farmworkers and their children, 

Tanya Pérez-Brennan '03 has been deemed a 2021 Finalist of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction for her novel, The Land of Demons and Dreams. The novel tells the story of a mother with an activist past in Colombia who flees to New York in the early 70’s for her ties to a socialist student group. Fast-forward several years later, her adult daughter, now a journalist, discovers the identity of her true father, a guerrilla fighter, and travels to Colombia to uncover her mother's hidden past, discovering a country to which she soon becomes inextricably tied. 

Dianne Finch ‘03 has published a book for Routledge, Big Data in Small Slices: Data Visualization for Communicators. The book and its accompanying website, designed for university classes as well as self-learners, targets communicators who are unfamiliar with data wrangling, cleaning and visualization, and offers an invaluable introductory resource for anyone interested in data visualization and storytelling, from journalism and communications students to public relations professionals. Big Data in Small Slices is available on Amazon as well as Routledge’s website.