Nikki Meredith is an award-winning journalist whose career started with National Public Radio. She subsequently worked as a feature writer for the Pacific Sun and the Marin Independent Journal. Her articles have also appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, Harpers, Psychology Today, Parenting, Health, USA Today, California Living and the Utne Reader.
Her book, The Manson Women and Me; Monsters, Morality, and Murder was published in 2018.
Yukari Iwatani Kane is a journalist and author. Her book, Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs, was published by HarperCollins in March 2014. She has more than fifteen years of experience covering the technology industry and wrote about Apple during the last years of Steve Jobs’s reign for The Wall Street Journal. She broke many stories, including the news about the CEO’s liver transplant. Before that, Yukari was a correspondent in Tokyo. She started her career at Reuters and U.S. News and World Report. She teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
William J. Drummond’s career includes stints at The (Louisville) Courier-Journal, where he covered the civil rights movement, and the Los Angeles Times, where he was a local reporter, then bureau chief in New Delhi and Jerusalem and later a Washington correspondent.
Drummond was appointed a White House Fellow in 1976 by President Gerald R. Ford, worked briefly for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and eventually became associate press secretary to President Jimmy Carter. In 1977 he joined NPR and became the founding editor of “Morning Edition.” He joined the Berkeley faculty in July, 1983.
His most significant recent contribution to journalism came by way of the partnership he established with the San Quentin News beginning in the summer of 2012.
My name is John C. Eagan and I am a retired journalist with more than 30 years in the news business. Born and raised in Florida, I served three years in the U.S. Army in South Carolina and Germany. I graduated from the University of Florida with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism. For 12 years I was with The Associated Press as reporter, editor and executive in San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Community activities have included San Rafael and Ignacio Rotary, Petaluma Kiwanis and Napa Optimist clubs, and Temple City Junior Chamber of Commerce. I am a member Tiburon Baptist Church. For more than 20 years I have come periodically with members of my church to Saturday evening services in the San Quentin Protestant Chapel.
Since 2008, I have been an adviser and mentor to the inmates who produce the San Quentin News, which had been shut down for about 18 years. In April 2008, then-Warden Robert Ayres Jr. asked me to help reactivate the newspaper, which I agreed to do as a volunteer.
If you'd like to know more, go to John C. Eagan's Bio.
Susanne Karch began volunteering at San Quentin with the S.Q.U.I.R.E.S. program in 2012. From the beginning she was extremely impressed with the quality of the men she met inside and she promptly became a subscriber of the San Quentin News. She is honored to contribute her time to helping the SQN grow its donor base.
Born and raised in Germany, Susanne emigrated to the United States with her family when she was 8. After many years in the corporate world as a sales executive on both coasts, she took time off to care for her ailing parents. Susanne has been self-employed for the past 18 years and has lived in the Bay Area since 1989.
Joan is a writer and event producer and producer of documentaries. Her previous positions include reporter for the Marin Independent Journal and Crittenden News Service, columnist for The News Marin and Assistant to the President for Public Information at College of Marin . Margaret Mead, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Gene Kelley and Julia Childs are among the people she has interviewed.
She has served as president of the Marin County Board of Education, Northern California Peace Corps Association, Marin Shakespeare Festival, Marin YMCA, Marin Chapter of National Women’s Political Caucus and Wednesday Morning Dialogue. She currently serves as an advisor to the San Quentin News and is on the board of directors of Marin Shakespeare Company. A San Francisco native, she is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer and received a BA in Journalism from San Francisco State University . She has one son, Scott, a lighting director, who lives in Honolulu .
Steve McNamara was one of the three initial advisers of the San Quentin News when Warden Bob Ayers revived it in the spring of 2008. Steve devised the paper’s design and typography, moving it toward its appearance as a real newspaper.
Steve brought 53 years of newspaper experience to the News. He had been a reporter and editor for daily, weekly and monthly publications in North Carolina, Miami, Europe and San Francisco. He was owner/editor/publisher of the Pacific Sun in Marin County from 1966 through 2004. He was president of the California Society of Newspaper Editors (dailies and weeklies), a director of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, and founding president of both the National Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and California Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Also, he taught journalism at San Francisco State University and was a member of the Innovation and Planning Commission of the California Department of Education.
If you'd like to know more, go to Steve McNamara's BIO.
Jan Perry was a professional journalist for 15 years, working first at the Pacific Sun newspaper as a proofreader and writer and then at string letter as a copy editor. She has lived almost all her life in Marin and is an enthusiastic reader, walker, cook and crossword fan. When she’s awake, she always has some kind of music playing.
Jon first met the San Quentin News team as part of a social sector-focused experiential learning course during his Berkeley-Haas MBA program.
Jon completed his MBA in May 2015. Hr stayed on as a business advisor to the SQ News and in early 2016, founded and became Director of the Friends of San Quentin News, an independent project under the 501c3 fiscal sponsorship of Social Good Fund. The Friends of San Quentin News is now the affiliated non-profit fundraising and business facilitation entity for SQ News and supports its circulation and social impact growth plan.
If you'd like to know more, go to Jon Spurlock BIO.
I am a native of Connecticut, but have lived in the Bay Area for all but six years since 1964. I served in the Marine Corps after high school and completed my undergraduate work at The University of Connecticut and my graduate studies at Stanford University. My Ph.D. dissertation research took me to Bogotá, Colombia where I lived for a year. I taught modern Latin American history and Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota for five years. I returned to the Bay Area in 1974 to launch an electronics business which I administered until I retired in 1989. In retirement, I became an art student and have done course work at the College of Marin and San Francisco City College as well as numerous workshops. I consider myself primarily a 3 dimensional artist and work with a wide variety of materials from steel to digital images.
For years I have been interested in issues of criminal and social justice; that interest often manifested itself in my art. I realized the opportunities of service at San Quentin when a SQN volunteer invited me to Peace Day in 2017. After meeting the staff I became convinced that I could make a contribution and since then I have focused my efforts on the search for sources of funding for the San Quentin News.
Tom is a retired management consultant who now works as a mentor and advisor to startups, small businesses and nonprofits on strategic messaging. He started working with the San Quentin News in 2018, helping them reboot their social media presence on Twitter. During his consulting career Tom worked for global firms including IBM Global Services, Gartner, and PWC, helping his clients bring about change by creating compelling narratives for leadership and employees. He has dabbled in journalism throughout his life and enjoys working with the men on promoting the San Quentin News and supporting its mission.
Linda Xiques became a San Quentin News adviser in the spring of 2013. Six years earlier, she had retired from a 30-year career in journalism thinking she had put deadlines behind her for good.
Like the men she now helps to mentor, Xiques learned her journalism skills while on-the-job. She began freelancing for various publications in the Bay Area then full-time reporter, and in 1982 was promoted to Managing Editor of the Pacific Sun. In Xiques’ 24-year tenure as Managing Editor and later Executive Editor of the newspaper, Pacific Sun reporters collected a total of 55 writing awards from press organizations such as the San Francisco Press Club, the CNPA, the Association of Alternative Newspapers, the Peninsula Press Club, the Lincoln Steffens Awards for Investigative Journalism, as well as others.
If you'd like to know more, go to Linda Xiques BIO.