UC Berkeley Journalism - Program

Magazine Program Faculty and Lecturers

Faculty

Lydia Chavez (Professor)
Lydia Chбvez started as a reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune, later moving on to Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, where she served as El Salvador and South American bureau chief. In 2005, Chбvez and her students collaborated to publish “Capitalism, God and A Good Cigar: Cuba Enters the Twenty-First Century” (Duke University Press). And in 1998, Chбvez published, “The Color Bind: California’s Battle Against Affirmative Action,” which won the Leonard Silk Award (UC Press). She has also written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Examiner and magazine pieces for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazines and George Magazine. She holds a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
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Mark Danner (Professor)
Mark Danner has written about international affairs, human rights and foreign wars for more than 20 years. He has covered Central America, Haiti, the Balkans and Iraq, among many other stories. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, Danner is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. His work also has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times op-ed page and many other publications, and he has written and helped produce television documentaries for ABC News. Danner is the author of “The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War,” “The Road to Illegitimacy,” and, most recently, “Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror.” He was named as a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and his work has been honored with a National Magazine Award, two Overseas Press Club Awards, and an Emmy, among other awards. Danner is a graduate of Harvard University.
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Cynthia Gorney (Professor)
Cynthia Gorney joined the faculty in 1999, after a career at The Washington Post that included serving as an award-winning national features writer, South American bureau chief and the first writer for the Post’s Style section based on the West Coast. She is the author of “Articles of Faith: A History of the Abortion Wars,” and has written for many magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and the American Journalism Review. She is currently a New Yorker staff writer. Gorney is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley.
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Michael Pollan (Professor)
Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto." His previous book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals", was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the James Beard Award for best food writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of "The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World", "A Place of My Own", and "Second Nature". A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism. His articles have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing, Best American Essays and the Norton Book of Nature Writing. Pollan served for many years as executive editor of Harper's Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley.
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Lecturers

Andrea Behr (Lecturer)
Andrea Behr is features copy desk chief at The San Francisco Chronicle, where she has worked since three weeks before the Loma Prieta earthquake. Before that she held a variety of editing positions at the San Jose Mercury News. She has a bachelor's degree in journalism from San Francisco State University.

Deirdre English (Lecturer)
Deirdre English has written and edited work on a wide array of subjects related to investigative reporting, cultural politics, gender studies, and public policy. She has contributed articles, commentaries and reviews to Mother Jones magazine, the Nation, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications, and to public radio and television. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of Mother Jones magazine where she worked for eight years, ending in 1986. She has taught American Studies and magazine writing and production at the College of Old Westbury at the State University of New York and has been a lecturer at City College of New York and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her most current work includes a revision of For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Anchor), co-authored with Barbara Ehrenreich and published with a new Afterword in 2004, and an essay on the work of photographer Susan Meiselas, published in Carnival Strippers, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003. She has directed the editing workshops program since 1988.

Terisa Estacio (Lecturer)
Terisa started working with KRON in 2001. A veteran of the news business, Terisa's experience spans much of the nation. She previously worked as a correspondent for CBS's Newspath traveling the nation to all breaking news events. Terisa has covered numerous high-profile court cases including the trial of the men accused of beating and killing Matthew Shepard's because he was gay, and the trial and execution of Timothy McVeigh. Terisa has also traveled the country covering national disasters including the country's worst floods, hurricanes, and fires. Turning to politics, Terisa worked as a White House correspondent for Tribune Broadcasting during President Clinton's first term. She was later on the scene for much of the breaking news surrounding the 2000 Presidential race between President Bush and then Candidate Al Gore. In more than two decades as a journalist, Terisa has worked for television stations in Los Angeles, Houston, Texas, Sacramento, Reno and Eureka. Now settled in the Bay Area, Terisa covers a wide range of topics for KRON-TV, with an emphasis on crime, the courts and top investigative stories of the day. Terisa was born and raised in the Bay Area and is very proud and extremely happy to be back home covering the important stories for Bay Area residents. She lives in the North Bay with her dog, Kalvin.

James Finefrock (Lecturer)
Jim Finefrock has been a journalist in San Francisco for more than 35 years for both the old San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. He was the first head of the Examiner's investigative team, Metro editor and editor of the editorial pages. He helped to create the Chronicle's Insight section and was its editor for the last six years. He's won several national awards for his reporting, including the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel, and numerous state and local awards.

Andrew Gilbert (Lecturer)
Andrew Gilbert has covered music, modern dance and film for numerous publications since 1989. He is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Contra Costa Times. His CD reviews air monthly on KQED’s “California Report.” Born and raised in Los Angeles, he earned a B.A. in politics from U.C. Santa Cruz. His master’s thesis for U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, a half-hour documentary on jazz/cabaret singer Wesla Whitfield, won a Golden Spire award at the 1999 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Tyche Hendricks (Lecturer)
Tyche Hendricks is a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she covers immigration and Latino affairs. She has worked in newspapers for a dozen years, including the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner, the San Jose Mercury News and the Seattle Times, and has covered transportation, urban planning, local government and breaking news. Hendricks has filed dispatches from Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua and she is currently writing a book on the U.S.-Mexico border for the University of California Press. She has also worked as a freelance radio producer. Prior to entering journalism she was an administrator and fundraiser for several non-profit organizations, including the League of Women Voters and the Seva Foundation. She speaks near-fluent Spanish and passable French. Hendricks holds a BA from Wesleyan University, and an MA in Latin American Studies and an MJ in Journalism, both from UC Berkeley.

Adam Hochschild (Lecturer)
Adam Hochschild is the author of six books, many of them on human rights issues. His latest, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award. His Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, collects some of the articles he has done in several decades of writing for various newspapers and magazines. In the past he has been a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, a commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," and an editor and writer at Mother Jones magazine. He recently spent several months putting some of the material in 'Bury the Chains' into interactive form for the BBC History website.
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David Lewis (Lecturer)
David Lewis is a projects editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he specializes in narrative journalism. He is also an independent filmmaker whose work has been shown at film festivals throughout the world. During his 18 years at The Chronicle, Lewis has edited numerous narrative serials, and he helped oversee an investigative narrative project about needle contamination that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. These days, Lewis is preparing for a newly created position at the newspaper in which he will help plan and edit Page 1 centerpieces and enterprise stories.

Joan Ryan (Lecturer)
Joan Ryan is an award-winning journalist and author. She is currently working on her third book, The Water Giver (2009, Simon & Schuster). It is a chronicle of two journeys: her 16-year-old son's recovery from a severe brain injury last year and her own transformation as a mother. Her newspaper work spans 25 years, the last 22 in San Francisco, first as a sports columnist, then an Op-Ed columnist and finally a metro columnist. She left the Chronicle in 2007. Her first book, "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters'' (1995, Doubleday) was a controversial, ground-breaking expose. Sports Illustrated named it one of the "Top 100 Sports Books of All Time.'' Her most recent honor, in 2007, was the prestigious Edgar A. Poe Award from the White House Correspondents Association for her searing four-part series about wounded soldiers, "War Without End.''

Russ Rymer (Lecturer)
Russ Rymer is an award-winning journalist and author whose career has been split between editing and writing. His freelance work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Harpers, Atlantic, Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. He has written two books. His first, Genie: A Scientific Tragedy, received a Whiting Writers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. His second book, American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory, was named a New York Times Notable Book and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Mr. Rymer has served as the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones magazine, executive editor for Portland (Oregon) Monthly, and as senior editor for other regional and national magazines including the Sunday magazine of the Atlanta Constitution, National and International Wildlife, and Science ’86. He has also been contributing editor for The Sciences and Hippocrates and writer-at-large for Los Angeles Magazine. His editing helped garner several National Magazine Awards for General Excellence; the 1988 National Magazine Award for Single Topic Issue went to a special edition of Hippocrates concerning medical ethics which he conceived, assigned and edited. He taught science writing at the California Institute of Technology and has lectured on journalism topics at Columbia, Sciences Po Paris, The Commonwealth Club and other universities and foundations and has talked about his books on The Today Show, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Diane Rehm Show and other national television and radio shows. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2002. He is currently at work on his third book, Out of Pernambuco, to be published by Houghton Mifflin and Berlin Verlag in 2008.

David Tuller (Lecturer)
David Tuller was a reporter and editor for ten years at the San Francisco Chronicle. He served as health editor at Salon.com and frequently writes health stories for the New York Times. He received his masters in public health at Berkeley in 2005.

Previous Instructors

Patricia Brown (Lecturer)
Patricia Leigh Brown has been writing features for The New York Times since 1986, starting as a staff writer for the Thursday "House & Home Section." She now contributes to "House & Home," the National news desk, the Friday "Escapes" section and the Sunday "Week in Review." Before coming to The Times she was a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer (1984-6), Metropolis magazine and for Clay Felker's East Side Express. In addition to The New York Times, Patti is a contributing writer for Architectural Digest.

Roger Cohn (Lecturer)
Roger Cohn was Editor-in-Chief of Mother Jones from 1999 through 2004, leading the magazine to the highest circulation in its history and winning numerous journalistic honors, including the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. From 1991 to 1997, Cohn was Executive Editor of Audubon, helping transform it from a nature publication into a magazine of environmental journalism. Prior to that, Cohn was a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer for 12 years, where he was awarded an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship for his reporting on the federal public housing system.

Kathy Corcoran (Lecturer)
Katherine Corcoran has been an award-winning newspaper journalist and magazine writer for more than two decades, including 13 years as a staff writer at the San Jose Mercury News. She was a 2005 Jefferson Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu and is currently Latino affairs writer at the Mercury News. Her journalism teaching experience includes visiting lecturer positions at Stanford and San Francisco State universities.

Barbara Ehrenreich (Lecturer)
Ehrenreich,the Koret Teaching Fellow, is an author and regular contributor to several publications including Harper?s, The Nation and Newsweek.

Tom Engelhardt (Lecturer)
Engelhardt is Consulting Editor of Metropolitan Books, co-creator of the American Empire Project (www.americanempireproject.com), and runs Tomdispatch.com, a news service/website of the Nation Institute. He is the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, and a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He has written for many magazines and newspapers and has been a book editor for 30 years.

Elizabeth Fishel (Lecturer)
Elizabeth Fishel has contributed to Vogue, Redbook, O, Family Circle, Ms., McCall’s, Parents, and Parenting, among many others. She was a Contributing Editor at Child where her series, “Through the Eyes of a Child” was nominated for a National Magazine Award. She is also the author of four nonfiction books including Sisters: Shared Histories and Lifelong Ties (Conari paperback, 1997) and Reunion: The Girls We Used To Be, The Women We Became (Random House, 2000).

Jack Hitt (Lecturer)
Jack Hitt is a regular contributor to Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, and to the public radio program "This American Life". Aside from a brief stint as senior editor at Harper's, he's worked freelance his entire career. Jack is a graduate of Columbia University's journalism school. He writes on an unusually wide variety of topics, and is one of the best freelance journalists working today.

Laurel Rosenhall (Lecturer)
Laurel Rosenhall has covered education for The Sacramento Bee since 2002, writing daily stories about testing, school lunches and church-state conflicts, as well as long-term projects that show how education policy decisions play out in the lives of individual students. She has reported on schools across California's varied landscape, from a one-room schoolhouse in the Sierras that served only two students to inner-city campuses where few students can read at grade-level.

Orville Schell (Professor and Dean)
Orville Schell has devoted most of his professional life to reporting and writing about Asia. Author of 14 books, nine about China, including “Discos and Democracy,” “Mandate of Heaven,” and “Virtual Tibet, ” Dean Schell also has written for WIRED, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Nation, Salon, The New Yorker, Harper’s and Newsweek. In the broadcast sector, Schell has served as correspondent for several PBS “FRONTLINE” documentaries and an Emmy-winning program on CBS’ “60 Minutes.” He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, an Overseas Press Club Award and the Harvard/Stanford Shorenstein Award for covering Asia. Schell has a bachelor’s degree in Far Eastern history from Harvard University and a master’s degree and Ph.D. (ABD) in Chinese history from the University of California at Berkeley.
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