Western Enterprise Reporters

Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter. In 2006, Mr. Egan won the National Book Award, considered the nation's highest literary honor, for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. The book also became a New York Times Bestseller.

In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series How Race Is Lived in America. He has done special projects on the West and the decline of rural America, and he has followed the entire length of the Lewis and Clark Trail. Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, and Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West. He lives in Seattle.

Peter Friederici (Water, Environment, Research Foundation - WERF), in residence at the Center in March 2009. While in residence at the Bill Lane Center, Peter's work is on reporting about the changing nature of the Urban-Wildland Interface and fire in the West, with special attention to the role of insurance companies in shaping the UWI.

Peter is an assistant professor of journalism at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where he teaches classes in feature writing and science writing. He has been hiking, observing, and writing about the Southwestern landscape since completing a master’s degree in environmental education from the Audubon Expedition Institute in 1991. In between stints as a field ornithologist and hiking tour leader on the Colorado Plateau and Sonoran Desert, he honed his craft as a writer and teacher. In his writings he focuses, in particular, on teasing out the intricate details of relationships between people and place. Friederici has written several books, including Nature's Restoration: People and Places on the Front Lines of Conservation (Island Press, 2006), which examines how grassroots activists across North America are working to restore their home landscapes. His writings also appear in Audubon, Orion, High Country News, and Plateau Journal, and have been anthologized in such collections as The Best American Spiritual Writing.

Jesse Hardman Jesse Hardman is a reporter with more than twelve years experience.  His work has been featured on National Public Radio, This American Life, Marketplace and a host of other public radio programs.   Hardman has a Master's degree from Harvard University where he researched free press and journalism development.   He has served as a Knight International Journalism Fellow in Lima, Peru, training professional reporters and teaching journalism at the Peruvian University of Applied Sciences(UPC).  For the past fourteen months, Jesse has been working for the International NGO Internews in Sri Lanka where he was a field coordinator training local journalists.  

Judy Pasternak received Stanford University's 2007 James V. Risser Prize for Environmental Journalism. She is a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times. Since 2001, her work has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and, as a finalist, the Goldsmith Award for Investigative Reporting. She has been at the Times for 23 years, based previously in Chicago and Los Angeles, and before that worked at the Detroit Free Press, Baltimore News American and Hollywood (Fla.) Sun-Tattler. She is married, with one son, and holds a bachelor's degree from Northwestern University.

Kurt Repanshek Paleontological puzzles, environmental topics, and travel destinations keep Kurt Repanshek on assignment throughout the West for such clients as Audubon, Hemispheres, National Geographic Traveler and Smithsonian Magazine.

Assignments have taken him into the back canyons of southern Utah's rugged Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, by rope to the top of the Grand Teton in Wyoming, on foot into the redrock backcountry of Canyonlands National Park, and into the dusty fossil boneyards of Utah and Wyoming. From the air over Nebraska he has traced the meandering path of the Platte River to report on how water diversions in Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska adversely affect endangered species. Kurt also has interviewed Robert Redford about the actor's environmental views, written about the debate over the health of Yellowstone's grizzly population, and portrayed the plight of Wilderness Study Areas and how the Bush administration's energy policy could adversely affect them.

Kurt, a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, is the author of the books National Parks of the West for Dummies, Hidden Utah, and Hidden Salt Lake City. He also is a contributor to The Unofficial Guide to Skiing & Snowboarding in the West.