News Releases
May 11, 2010
For Immediate Release
For additional information:
Barbara Kerr, APR
Executive Director of
Communications and Marketing
Telephone: 360-992-2921
Email: bkerr@clark.edu
Clark College:
Commencement 2010
Award-winning author, journalist and attorney Heidi W. Durrow
will be the keynote speaker at the college’s commencement ceremony
on Thursday, June 17
VANCOUVER, Wash. – Award-winning author, journalist and attorney Heidi W. Durrow will be the keynote speaker at Clark College’s 2010 commencement ceremony. The commencement ceremony will be held on Thursday, June 17 at the Sleep Country USA Amphitheater (formerly the Amphitheater at Clark County), 17200 NE Delfel Road, Ridgefield. The ceremony will begin at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
During the 2009-2010 academic year, 1,305 men and women have earned degrees and certificates from Clark College. Approximately 390 graduates are expected to take part in the commencement ceremony. Clark is the second largest community/technical college in the state of Washington.
During the ceremony, Clark College President Robert K. Knight will announce the winners of the 2010 Exceptional Faculty Award.
He will also announce the winner of the Community College President’s Award. That scholarship will be given to a Clark College graduate who is transferring to a WSU Vancouver degree program and who has demonstrated leadership potential, is community service oriented, and who has a strong academic record. The scholarship award is in the amount of full-time tuition (10-18 credits) per year and is renewable for one additional year or a total of four semesters.
About Heidi W. Durrow
Heidi W. Durrow is a graduate of Stanford, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Law School. She is the recipient of a Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Writers, a Jentel Foundation Residency, and won top honors in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition and the Chapter One Fiction Contest. She has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the American Scandinavian Foundation, the Roth Endowment and the American Antiquarian Society.
Originally from Portland, Oregon, Heidi has worked as a corporate litigator at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and as a consultant to the National Football League and National Basketball Association. She is the co-host of the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat; and the co-founder and co-producer of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, an annual free public event, that celebrates stories of the Mixed experience.
Durrow's writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Callaloo, Poem/Memoir/Story, the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Essence magazine, and Newsday.
She received writer Barbara Kingsolver's 2008 Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change for The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, her first novel.
Information about Heidi W. Durrow is available at http://heidiwdurrow.com/
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