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Hank Phillippi Ryan '71 (she was Harriet
Ann Sablosky at Western) is a prolific and
award-winning writer. She is also a prolific and
award-winning television reporter. Hank successfully
merges the two callings in her popular series of
mystery novels featuring
Boston
investigative reporter Charlotte "Charlie"
McNally. (Hank is an on-air investigative reporter
for WHDH-TV in
Boston.) The most recent of the novels, Drive
Time, was published in February 2010 and
received a starred review from Library
 Journal;
the first, Prime
Time, won the Agatha Award for best new mystery
in 2007; the third in the series, Air Time, was an Agatha Award nominee. At WHDH, where she has been
since her hiring in 1983 as a general assignment
reporter, Hank has won 26 EMMYs, "10 or so"
Edward R. Murrow Awards, plus countless regional,
national and international recognitions for writing,
editing and "hard-hitting investigations." She
is especially proud that her "consumer
investigative reporting has changed laws and changed
lives." For a more complete look at Hank's life
and times -- and to read her new short story -- go
to her website.
Hank was at
Western "with much delight" in 1967-69. She
writes, "I adored it. Had the life-changingly
wonderful Dr. [Alice] Blitch (my first book is
dedicated to her), lived in Mary
Lyon, wore my trench coat with a Lanz nightgown
underneath to German class at 8 a.m. for an entire
semester (and I don't think anyone
noticed)."
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Dan Pribble '02
has won a significant literary award for his writing
even though he is not yet an established author. A
native of
Oxford,
Ohio, Dan received the 2010 Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant,
awarded by the Ohioana Library Association, a state
agency "dedicated to collecting, preserving,
and promoting the written work of Ohio's writers, artists, and musicians." This
particular grant is given annually "to
encourage writers under 30 who have not yet
published a book" and to help them launch
publishing careers. In announcing Dan's winning
entry -- an excerpt from the first chapter of a
novel he's writing (working title: All
the Way Gone) printed in the fall 2010 Ohioana
Quarterly  --
judges said, "Pribble writes fully realized,
compelling characters and his stories have a strong
sense of narrative and place. He is truly a young
writer to watch out for." Now living in
Boston, where he is on the staff of the MIT Libraries,
working as an interlibrary borrowing associate, Dan
earned his M.F.A. at
Emerson
College. His earlier fiction has appeared in the magazines Inklings
(Miami
University), Redivider (Emerson) and The
Diner Journal. And clearly, writing was his
focus at Western. In 2001, as one of 100 students in
Miami's Undergraduate Summer Scholar program, his subject
was "Tradition in the Classroom: The
Storyteller's Role in Education." The title
of his senior paper was "Staring with Words:
Teaching Kids Philosophy with Literature" --
about using children's lit to teach critical
thinking to elementary-school children -- and it
remains one of his proudest achievements at Western.
The WCAA Bulletin
last had news of Dan in fall 2007 when, as the Rev.
Daniel J. Pribble of the Progressive Universalist
Life Church, he was due to officiate at the Kumler
Chapel wedding of classmate Todd Nadenichek and
Kristen DeLap '05. But he says he "loved, loved, loved Western" and visits the campus whenever he
comes home to see his parents, who still live in Oxford.
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