Forum Network

GlobalPost CEO and President Philip S. Balboni has spent a lifetime building award-winning news teams and has an exceptional record of creativity and entrepreneurship. He has been a pioneer in local and regional television as the founder and president of New England Cable News, the nation's first, largest and most honored regional network. Mr. Balboni has been recognized throughout the industry for NECN's significant journalistic and financial success. He has also been the direct or leadership recipient of scores of national journalism awards, including the Peabody Award, the duPont-Columbia Award and the Edward R. Murrow prize.

Professor Bortman teaches Business Law and Constitutional Law. He worked in the law department at John Hancock Financial Services, specializing in tax law and corporate law, and later managed several units of their accounting department. He also served for nine years on the school committee in his home town of Winchester, where he focused on budgetary matters and labor negotiations. From 1995 until 2001, he taught a variety of business and law courses at Suffolk University, Boston University, Massachusetts School of Law, and Tufts University, as well as at Babson. He has been full time at Babson since 2001. Professor Bortman recently published his first book, *Sacco and Vanzetti*, for Commonwealth Editions. He has also contributed a number of chapters to American history textbooks. Areas of expertise include business law and constitutional law.

Iris Adler is an award-winning director and producer, and executive editor of in-depth programming at New England Cable News (NECN). Her work on "Hidden Wounds" earned her a 30th annual Boston/New England Emmy. Other work includes the short film, *Just Married: The Epic Battle over Gay Marriage*.

Rebecca Wheeler is an expert on teaching Standard English in dialectically diverse classrooms. Wheeler works with literacy coaches, communication specialists, and classroom teachers K - 14 who want to know what to do about all those missing -ed's, -s's in their students' writing. While her work currently focuses on helping teachers respond to African American student writers, the insights and strategies she brings extend to any group of students who speak and write an Everyday English differing from Formal Standard American English. Wheeler shows teachers how to build on what students do know Community Engl*ish as they add Standard English to their linguistic repertoires. Her book Code-Switching: Teaching Standard English in Urban Classrooms*, written in partnership with elementary educator Rachel Swords, offers teachers linguistic insights and practical strategies for the urban classroom. Wheeler has served as consultant for public schools K 14 from New York to New Orleans, and from Chicago to Arkansas. For 2007 - 2008, Wheeler is Principal Investigator on a grant, Technology Enhanced Learning of English and Science in Middle School, VA funded through the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia under the federal Title II, Part A - Improving Teacher Quality State Grants. She is a literacy consultant and spokesperson for the National Council of Teachers of English.

Alan Alda recently had the distinction of being nominated for an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy. In the same year, he also published a bestselling book.

Joseph R. Bankoff joined the Woodruff Arts Center in September 2006 as president and CEO. He has been an active part of the Atlanta arts community for many years. He worked to raise funds for Atlanta Arts Alliance (original name of the Woodruff Arts Center) and the 1983 expansion of the High Museum. He is a charter member of the High and long-time subscriber to the Alliance Theatre. He joined the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's Board of Directors in 1996 after arranging for the ASO to perform at the Olympics Games Opening and Closing ceremonies.

A physician, humorist, storyteller, and best-selling novelist, Ferrol Sams is the author of eight books. Most notable is his trilogy of novels in which an eccentric and quixotic hero, Porter Osborne Jr., mirrors Sams's own Georgia boyhood in Fayette County. All of his works are rooted in the oral traditions of southern humor and folklore. With engaging and graceful prose, Sams's fiction celebrates love of the land, the changing southern landscape, and what he calls "being raised right" in the rural South. One of four children born to Mildred Matthews and Ferrol Sams Sr., the Fayette County school superintendent, Ferrol Sams Jr. (nicknamed "Sambo" by his father) was born on September 26, 1922, in Fayetteville, in the house built by his great-grandfather in 1848. Ferrol Sams Jr. graduated from Mercer University in Macon in 1942 and attended Emory University School of Medicine for two quarters before joining the U.S. Army Medical Corps. After serving from 1943 to 1947 and seeing action in France, Sams returned to Emory to continue his medical studies. He received his M.D. in 1949. He began writing his first novel in September 1978, as notes for a family history, so he could tell his four children and ten grandchildren what it was like to grow up in rural Georgia between the two world wars. The novel, which became a national best-seller, is a boy's account of growing up on an ancestral farm in Georgia. With wit, humor, and old-fashioned moralizing, Sams's stories are about unlikely encounters and what people learn from them. A natural storyteller whose works have made him a popular writer in the South and garnered favorable national attention, Ferrol Sams was honored in 2001 for fifty years of commitment and service to the people of Fayette County. In 2006 *Run with the Horsemen* was selected by Atlantans as the inaugural text in the Atlanta Reads: One Book, One Community program. In 2007 Sams was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.