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  • Ernest C. Withers, a photographer whose voluminous catalog of arresting black-and-white images illustrates a history of life in the segregated South in the 1950s and 1960s, from the civil rights movement to the Beale Street music scene, died in Memphis at age 85. Ernest C. Withers was born on Aug. 7, 1922, in Memphis. He worked as a photographer in the Army in World War II and started a studio when he returned. He also worked for about three years as one of the first nine African-American police officers in Memphis. Besides his son Joshua, also known as Billy, Mr. Withers is survived by his wife, Dorothy; two other sons, Andrew Jerome and Perry, both of Memphis; a daughter, Rosalind, of West Palm Beach, Fla.; 15 grandchildren; and 8 great-grandchildren. Besides documenting music and civil rights, Mr. Withers also turned his lens on the last great years of Negro League baseball. His work appeared in publications like *Time*, *Newsweek* and *The New York Times* and has been collected in four books: *Let Us March On*, *Pictures Tell the Story*, *The Memphis Blues Again* and *Negro League Baseball*.
  • Born in 1948, Havana, Cuba. Education Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME: Bachelor of Art, 1977 Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT: Master of Fine Arts, 1981Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME: Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, 1997 Present Positions Professor of Photography Massachusetts College of Art and Design Boston, MA Alturas Foundation Artist-in-Residence, south Texas, 2008-2009 Happy and Bob Doran Artist-in-Residence, Yale University Art Gallery,New Haven, CT, 2008-2009. Awards 2006 The Decordova Museum Rappaport Prize 1995 St Botolph's Club Foundation Award 1994 New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship 1993 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship 1992 Cintas Foundation Fellowship
  • She is the daughter of award winning author John McPhee and photographer Pryde Brown, sister of novelists Jenny McPhee and Martha McPhee, architectural historian Sarah McPhee, and Joan Sullivan, founding principal of the Bronx Academy of Letters. McPhee earned a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Princeton University in 1980, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1986. McPhee was awarded a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship in 1998 for work in India and Sri Lanka and a residency in Idaho from Alturas Foundation 2003-2005. She was also awarded a New England Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 1995 and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 1993. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Center, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. McPhee is a Professor of Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She is represented by the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York and the Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston, MA.
  • Melvyn P. Leffler, faculty associate in the Governing America in a Global Era Program, is Edward R. Stettinius professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. He served as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at University of Virginia from 1997-2001. In 1993 he won the Bancroft Prize for *A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War* (1992) and, in 2008, won the George Louis Beer Prize for his book, *For the Soul of Mankind: the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War* (Hill & Wang, 2007). Leffler served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during the Carter administration, where he worked on arms control and contingency planning as a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1993, and is the author of several articles and essays seeking to put contemporary developments after 9/11 in historical perspective.
  • **Hillary Rodham Clinton** has served as secretary of state, senator from New York, first lady of the United States, first lady of Arkansas, a practicing lawyer and law professor, activist, and volunteer—but the first thing her friends and family will tell you is that she’s never forgotten where she came from or who she’s been fighting for. Hillary grew up in a middle-class home in Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago. Her dad, Hugh, was a World War II Navy veteran and a small-business owner who designed, printed, and sold drapes. Hugh was a rock-ribbed Republican, a pay-as-you-go kind of guy who worked hard and wasted nothing. Hillary helped with the family business whenever she could
  • Benedict J. Fernandez was born on April 5, 1936 in New York City, in the Hispanic neighborhood of East Harlem. Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director and graphic designer, invited him to enroll in his Design Laboratory and became Fernandez's most influential mentor. Brodovitch arranged for Ben to become the darkroom tech and manager at Parsons School of Design. Nobody could have imagined in those very early days what a significant role Ben would eventually play at Parsons. With Brodovitch's encouragement Ben went on to found the Photo Film Workshop, in the basement of Joseph Papp's Public Theatre. The Photo Film Workshop taught photography to ghetto youth, free of charge. Many of the workshop participants went on to successful careers and lives.
  • Early is a noted essayist and American culture critic. A professor of English, of African & African American studies and of American culture studies, Early is the author of several books, including *The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting*, *Literature*, and *Modern American Culture*, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He is also editor of numerous volumes, including *This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s* (2003); *The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader* (2001); *Miles Davis and American Culture* (2001); *The Muhammad Ali Reader *(1998); and *Body Language: Writers on Spor*t (1998). He served as a consultant on Ken Burns' documentary films on baseball and jazz, which both aired on PBS.
  • Molly Armstrong began her career as a caseworker with adolescent girls. In 1986, she built a transitional living program for homeless teenage girls and mothers. After graduating from law school and spending some years as a public defender in the District of Columbia, she joined the Vera Institute of Justice in New York. At Vera, she built a 24/7 response system, Project Confirm, to address the over-representation of foster youth in the juvenile justice system by coordinating among the City's Department of Juvenile Justice, Probation, and child welfare systems. Molly authored the Family Court Improvement Project court processing study for New York State. She helped the leadership at the Administration for Children's Services, New York City's then newly created child welfare agency, at the start of its reform, diagnose a series of challenges with adolescent practice, kinship care, and data systems. Over eight years, she researched, designed and implemented a series of other interventions to address overlap among the child welfare, juvenile justice, substance abuse, and mental health systems. In 2004, she received the Kathryn McDonald Award for Excellence in Service to the Family Court from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. After leaving New York City to assist Governor Blanco's juvenile justice reform efforts in Louisiana, she joined New Jersey's Department of Children and Families as Director of Policy and Planning. There she focused on rebuilding New Jersey's foster care recruitment and licensing practice and developing the performance metrics, tools, and capacity used to drive reform. Molly specializes in utilizing intensive field and data diagnostics to identify challenges and then design and implement practical, effective and efficient solutions. She is a graduate of Yale University with a law degree from New York University and a Masters of Law in Clinical Advocacy from Georgetown.