Advisory Board
ANNETTE JOHN-HALL is an award-winning metro columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She was previously a features reporter and columnist focusing on music, film television and pop culture. A native of Berkeley, Calif. and a graduate of San Francisco State University, she covered professional, college and high school sports at the San Jose Mercury News, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and the Oakland Tribune. Her column appears Tuesdays and Fridays in the Inquirer’s metro section.
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KATE KILPATRICK, a senior multimedia editor at NBC in NYC, is a Philadelphia-born, award-winning writer and editor. She frequently reports on youth, urban and Latin American cultures, and has produced stories from Mexico City, Dominican Republic, Bolivia and Tijuana. Her print and multimedia stories have appeared in Philadelphia Weekly, The Washington Post, Mission Local, WHYY-FM, Fader, Black Book, and Dazed & Confused. Kate received a B.A. in print journalism from NYU in 2000, and a M.J. in new media production from University of California Berkeley in 2010.
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DIANE MCKINNEY-WHETSTONE grew up in Philadelphia, the city that is both setting and character in her five novels: “Tumbling,” “Tempest Rising,” “Blues Dancing,” “Leaving Cecil Street” and “Trading Dreams at Midnight.” Her novels have garnered many awards. Both “Leaving Cecil Street” and “Trading Dreams at Midnight” won the American Library Association (Black Caucus) Literary Award for Fiction, and “Tumbling” drew high honors from groups ranging from the Athenaeum of Philadelphia to the national Go On Girl Book Club. She has been a contributor to Essence Magazine and her work appears in the anthologies Bluelight Corner and Mending the World. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and presently teaches fiction writing there. She is also a proud graduate of West Philadelphia High School and a member of the board of directors of the WPHS Alumni Association.
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LIZ SPIKOL, a Philadelphia native, is the editor of Curbed Philadelphia, a neighborhood and real estate blog. Previously, Liz wrote “The Trouble With Spikol,” a first-person newspaper column and blog about mental illness. She has won awards from the Society for Professional Journalists, the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, the National Mental Health Association and the Philadelphia Psychiatric Society. Liz has been featured on National Public Radio, the Discovery Channel, and in the New York Times and Huffington Post.
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ROBERT STRAUSS is a journalist and the author of “Daddy’s Little Goalie,” a memoir about being the father of girl jocks. Robert’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. He’s been a reporter, a news producer and a TV critic. Since he was in fifth grade and wrote the classic “The Slick Second Baseman,” Strauss has wanted a career in writing. He is also a devoted, if somewhat untalented, basketball and piano player.
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BEN YAGODA is a writer and educator. Since 1992, he’s been teaching English, journalism and writing at the University of Delaware. He has authored six books: “Will Rogers: A Biography,” The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism,” “About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made,” “The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing,” “When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech,” “For Better and/or Worse,” and his most recent, “Memoir: A History.” A 1975 graduate of Yale University, Ben has written for numerous publications and websites, including the New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone and Slate.
