Meet our Youth Story Contest judges for 2018!
Film
Tracy Rector
Tracy Rector (Choctaw/Seminole) is a producer, director, activist, and co-founder of Longhouse Media. She has made over 400 short films, and is in production of her fifth feature documentary. Her work has been featured on Independent Lens, Cannes Film Festival, ImagineNative, National Geographic, Toronto International Film Festival, and in the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian. She is a current Firelight Media Lab Fellow, a former WGBH Producer Fellow, Tribeca Grantee, and Sundance Institute Lab Fellow. In 2016, Tracy was awarded the Stranger Genius Award. Tracy lives in Tacoma.
Chrissy Cooley
Chrissy Cooley has been active in the field of university sustainability for over 15 years. She currently works at Pierce Conservation District as the Climate Resiliency Program Manager. Chrissy’s work has focused on climate mitigation techniques through both green building practices and behavior change campaigns. In the past, she used the campus as a living laboratory where students engaged through their curriculum and every-day life activities. Cooley earned her Bachelors in Environmental Science from The Ohio State University, and her MBA in 2011. She organizes the Tacoma chapter for Green Drinks, a program designed to build conversations around sustainability. She can often be found hiking the Pacific Northwest Mountains or biking the back roads of Washington.
Silong Chhun
Producer, designer, and musician Silong Chhun was born during the Khmer Rouge Regime and immigrated to America, settling in Tacoma, WA. Silong plays piano, bass, guitar, & produces beats, was the frontman, producer, and engineer for rap group The 2nd Language, & provided music production for the award-winning documentary Cambodian Son. Silong & his father founded the Sinn Sisamouth Foundation and Silong works with artists and djs in Cambodia and throughout the world, producing beats and mentoring. In 2013, Silong launched Red Scarf Revolution, giving voice to once silenced art, culture, and language, and memorializing the darkest tragedy in the history of Cambodia with designs that represent the resiliency of the Cambodian people.
Amy E. Ryken
Amy E. Ryken, Dean and Professor, School of Education at the University of Puget Sound teaches courses focused on classroom teaching and learning in nearby nature. Amy’s research include understanding and improving teacher learning, and partnerships with school and community resources. She researched industrial sites transformed into public landscapes on Tacoma’s Ruston Way waterfront to aid city officials in development plans through an understanding of visitor perceptions. She is author of the Environment and Learning blog. Publications include “Engaging children’s spontaneous questions about social diversity,” for Multicultural Perspectives (2015) and the co-written “Because it’s a girl cake!: Fostering dialogue about gender identity in elementary classrooms,” in Northwest Passage: Journals of Educational Practices (2012). Ryken is author of the book “Are you a boy or a girl: Conversations about gender in elementary classrooms” (2011).
Korbett Mosesly
Korbett Mosesly is a non-profit management and public policy consultant with over 10 years of experience working in non-profit and government sectors on a broad range of issues, including education, affordable housing, and workforce development; as well as a freelance publisher. He serves on the City of Tacoma’s Human Service Commission and Vision 2025 Advisory Committee, and the Board of Directors of the Puyallup Watershed Initiative. Korbett has provided consulting services for the City of Tacoma’s Neighborhood Council Program and Neighborhood Business District Program. Korbett publishes the Hilltop Action Journal newspaper, a volunteer organized publication focused on community priorities of Tacoma’s Hilltop residents. He is a long-time member of the Pierce County Black Collective and a Senior Fellow (class 18) of the American Leadership Forum. He currently works as the Director of Family Stability Initiatives for United Way of Pierce County and lives with his wife and three boys in Tacoma, Washington.
Jamika Scott
Jamika Scott, Tacoma native, is a children’s advocate, activist, and writer. Her passion for writing has been burning since childhood, but she was drawn to film writing by a mentor in college and has been at it ever since. As a co-founder of the Tacoma Action Collective, she works toward building an equitable city as a community organizer, and often incorporates her love of film into her social justice work.
Damico Clark
A SeaTac area video producer, Clark started his production venture doing music videos by cofounding a collective named the Digggers, a platform for independent rap artists and their videos.
This fall, he’ll be premiering his directorial debut, Monk: a short film following a jazz musician who’s on a soul search during a weekend visit home.
Poetry
William Kupinse
William Kupinse is associate professor of English at University of Puget Sound, where he teaches British and Irish literature, ecocriticism, and creative writing. His poems have appeared in The Fourth River, Green Letters, Cascade, and Cimarron Review literary journals. Kupinse was Tacoma’s Poet Laureate from 2008–09. A collection of his poems, titled Fallow, was published with support from the Tacoma Arts Commission in 2009. Two of his poems, set to music by Tacoma composer Greg Youtz, will be sung at Ocean Fest by soprano Erin Calata.
Josie Emmons Turner
Emmons Turner was the 2011-2013 Tacoma Poet Laureate. Her work has been published in national journals and has been included in the Floating Bridge Review, In Tahoma’s Shadow, California Quarterly, and the Backstreet Review. She has founded and/or managed a variety of cultural organizations and is currently teaching senior and sophomore writing classes at Clover Park High School. She received her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing through the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.
Christina Butcher
Based out of Tacoma, Washington, Christina writes and produces multimedia content professionally across Washington state’s South Puget Sound. She’s also a veteran of the U.S. Army, where she worked as a Chinese-Mandarin linguist for six years. She holds degrees in anthropology and Chinese-Mandarin language studies, as well as a certificate in storytelling and content strategy.