So You Want to be a Journalist? James and Mollie Dickenson Offer the inside Scoop, February 24

Chestertown, MD, February 17, 2006 — Looking for the inside scoop? Washington College's Sophie Kerr Committee and Rose O'Neill Literary House present "Careers in Journalism," a lecture by James R. Dickenson from The Washington Post and Mollie M. Dickenson, a freelance journalist and author of THUMBS UP: The Life and Courageous Comeback of White House Press Secretary Jim Brady, Friday, February 24, at 4 p.m. at the Rose O'Neill Literary House. The event is free and the public is invited to attend.

For almost thirty years, James R. Dickenson served as a political reporter, editor, and columnist for The Washington Post, The Washington Star, The National Observer, andUnited Press International. Covering every presidential campaign from 1964 to 1968, he also reported on monumental events, including the Watergate scandal, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and the war in Vietnam. A media consultant to the Library of Congress and its Open World Russian Leadership Program, he is the author of We Few: The Marine Corps 400 in the War Against Japan and Home On The Range: A Century On the High Plains,nominated for a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

As a freelance writer on politics and economics, Mollie M. Dickenson has reported for The Washington Star, The Washington Post, Salon.com, TomPaine.com, Consortiumnews.com, and Worth magazine. She has also hosted her own radio talk show and has been a featured panelist on the political talk show Battleline on the Radio America network. Recently, Dickenson published THUMBS UP: The Life and Courageous Comeback of White House Press Secretary Jim Brady, offering a complete and striking portrait of the former press secretary.

The reading is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee, which works to carry on the legacy of the late Sophie Kerr, a writer from Denton, Md., whose generosity has done so much to enrich Washington College's literary culture. When she died in 1965, Kerr left the bulk of her estate to the College, specifying that one half of the income from her bequest be awarded every year to the senior showing the most "ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor" and the other half be used to bring visiting writers to campus, to fund scholarships, and to help defray the costs of student publications.