Tag: 1990s alum

Valerie Nyberg (BEd 1996, MA 2004) is beginning her second year as principal at Ames High School in Ames, Iowa. She is the first African American woman to hold this position in Ames, and one of only a handful in the entire state of Iowa.

Previously Dr. Nyberg earned her PhD in Teaching and Learning from the University of Iowa in 2012. She also earned her administrator’s certificate while working on her doctorate. In 2013 she went from educational consulting to become the associate principal at George Washington High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In 2019, she earned the School Administrators of Iowa’s Assistant Secondary Principal of the Year Award, which led to her current position. As the award recipient, Dr. Nyberg wrote guest blogs for the National Association of Secondary School Principals under their AP Expert of the Week banner.

Valerie has three sons, aged 25, 22, and 19, which she raised as a single parent during her doctorate studies. Her middle son graduated from Northwestern University in June 2021 with a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering. He starts his full-time job at Boeing in the aerospace division in August. Her youngest son is currently entering his sophomore year at the University of Iowa. Her oldest son is working in management in the food service industry in Iowa and is writing two fantasy novels. Dr. Nyberg is starting to build a consulting business in the area of equity and trauma-informed care, and is also working on a couple of creative nonfiction writing projects.

Since its publication in 2020, Katie Mather’s young-adult novel Rage is a Wolf has received a good deal of attention including a starred review from Kirkus, which called it “a work of unusual depth and ambition. It is a climate change novel, yes, but it’s a book about so much more: angst, idealism, self-discovery, and reclaiming the world by reclaiming the narrative. A bold and inventive environmental tale with a striking protagonist.”

Jayne recently moved back to Bellingham after graduating in the 1990s. Since returning, she has broadened her career narrating audio books for publishers like Penguin Random House and Scholastic by recording several books by local authors at Binary Recording Studio here in town. Jayne also landed a recurring role on the new Netflix show Blockbuster, which films in Vancouver, Canada.

Joanna Nesbit stayed in Bellingham after graduation, having married someone who had just relocated here for a job. She works as a freelance writer, both content marketing and journalism, and appreciates every day the writing skills she gained at Western. She has two grown kids, one working on a Ph.D. in ecology at the University of Arizona, and the other graduating this summer from Western with a degree in economics and math.

Thomas Phinney is gainfully employed in the construction industry, and while he has yet to do anything professionally with his degree and studies of creative non-fiction at Western, some of the students and faculty from his time here remain his favorite people and he has no complaints about where life has taken him.

Katie Sachs graduated in 2020 from the University of Saint Francis in Joliet, Illinois, with a Master of Science in Training and Development.

In fall 2020, Jimmy Watts had a long-form essay published in the famed quarterly The Flyfish Journal. The essay is about Death Cab for Cutie drummer and Bellingham local Jason McGerr and his time spent gathering on rivers with other musicians and writers.

Sandra Spicher edits and indexes books for authors and publishers. She has been freelancing since the end of her fellowship at the University of Texas Press in 2013, regularly copyedits for bestselling mystery writer Susan Wittig Albert, and has indexed many nonfiction books. One of the most important things she learned at Western was how to use a comma. She would like to thank Professor Kathryn Trueblood.