Alumni Magazines Produce Mighty Work

Hamilton handed over their magazine to guest editor Edvige Jean-Francois for a power look at the Black experience in America.

“We may be small, but we are mighty,” Christie Antoniewicz of CASE told me when I asked her about the Editors Forum numbers. The conference usually welcomes 200-250 people to cool cities around the country. This year—the first year back in person from Covid—we barely made 150 when we gathered at the Hyatt Regency in downtown San Francisco. 

No matter, really. We really were mighty. 

That was evident in the excellent work and expertise of higher ed editors shared in the sessions I attended. Though there were plenty of incredible, pie-in-the-sky, inspirational speakers, too—Rubén Martínez, multimedia journalist, author, performer and Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University; Nikki Silva, Co-Founder, The Kitchen Sisters, Independent Radio and Documentary Producers; and Sasha Issenberg, journalist and author of The Engagement: America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage—I was really struck by the deep, important work being done on college campuses across the country. 

Great practical advice throughout the conference will surely help editors make even better magazines—killing our darlings in our writing; bettering our photography; and building more interesting pieces outside the feature well. 

But the session that will stick with me for a long while? That was the one led by Stacey J. Himmelberger, Senior Director of Content Strategy and Editor of Hamilton Magazine; Edvige Jean-Francois, global journalist/media consultant and guest editor Hamilton Magazine; and Mark M. Mullin, Senior Director of Visual Communications, Hamilton College. They told the story of creating a magazine that gives voice to what it means to be Black in America. There were parts of their work as it flashed on the screen that nearly brought me to tears (specifically a breakdown of “The Talk,” pictured above, as remembered by one alum).

These stories? They. Are. Mighty.