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LUCY ALLEN is Staff Folklorist at the Hiddenite Center, a folk and cultural arts organization located in the northern foothills of N.C. and covering Alexander, Iredell, Catawba, Burke, and Wilkes Counties. She has also taken over as the Secretary-Treasurer of the N.C. Folklore Society., a job with few privileges and many responsibilities. And if that’s not enough, she is completing her dissertation on collectors of Southern vernacular music, 1900-1932, so that Memorial University of Newfoundland will give her her doctorate.

JEAN ANSPAUGH, the self-proclaimed “folklorist of the fat,” is enjoying the runaway success of her recently published book, Fat Like Us. The book, based on her M.A. research here in the Folklore Curriculum, has generated lots of national (and international!) attention, including a twice-broadcast feature story on CBS’s Sixty Minutes. A collection of narratives from dieters enrolled in Durham’s Rice Diet, the book is being widely touted as “the fat community’s Canterbury Tales.” For more about Jean and the book, visit http://www.fatlikeus.com.

ENRIQUE ARMIJO studied Journalism as an undergrad and graduated from the Curriculum in 2000, writing an ethnography on Latino immigrant religious tradition for his thesis. He has worked on oral history projects with Durham youth and taught Oral History in the Continuing Ed Certificate Program at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies. He currently works as a Civil Rights Specialist in the Orange County Department of Human Rights and Relations, conducting outreach and enforcement activities in the area of discrimination. He is also currently the principal fieldworker for Tradición Latina, a documentary project focusing on traditional artists featured in the El Pueblo North Carolina Artists' Directory.

BRUCE BAKER moved to Chapel Hill in 1999 to work on his Ph.D. in history. He's planning a dissertation about social memory of Reconstruction. He's received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (1999-2000) and a Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellowship (2000-2003). His article about an ill-fated labor organization in South Carolina appeared in Labor History in 1999, and he began an oral history project on the last remaining Farmers Alliance cooperative store in the country, which is still open in Siler City. He presented this research at the 2000 OHA meeting. He's also written a couple of reviews on ballad scholarship for the JAF.

ALAN BARAGONA is still a professor of English at VMI, teaching medieval literature and directing Institute Honors and a General Education Pilot program. In 2000, he presented a paper at Penn State on using the Web to teach Arthurian Legend, which will be published in SMART, and another at the Southeast Medieval Association on the last 13 years of scholarship on Chaucer's Prioress.

PETER BARTIS is into his twentieth year at the American Folklife Center. In April he organized a conference for folklore chairs at the Library of Congress, a meeting which has done much to bring together the diverse programs across the country. His current task is the development of a model folklife in K-12 education program—The Montana Heritage Project. Now in its third year the Project has received over $392,000 in support from the Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenburg Foundation. It develops a summer institute for teachers and fully supports teacher and student designed research projects during the school year.

A native of England, BRUCE BASTIN is the author of Crying for the Carolines and Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast. He is also managing director of Interstate Music, Ltd., West Sussex, England.

FREDA HANKINS BEATY continues teaching in the English Department at Stephen F. Austin University and enjoys using North Carolina artifacts in her Introduction to Folklore course. She reports that she and her husband Daniel have just returned from two months in Switzerland and France "back to the scorched earth of Texas." They also run a business called International Translations, Inc., specializing in services for business, the humanities, and the fine arts. Her daughter Ashley is a chef in Atlanta, and Cece has just returned from a stint in the Peace Corps.

SUZANNE COMER BELL edits book manuscripts for university presses and is writing nonfiction personal essays and children's stories. One children's book is based on the familiar folksong "Johnny Hammers with One Hammer," retitled Johnny's MOMMY Hammers with Six Hammers and winks at parents as it illustrates how they juggle six or eight things at any given moment. An unexpected connection with folklore studies is Suzanne's role as a storyteller in Godly Play, a Montessori-derived method of Christian education for children, in which storytelling is central.

In the summer of 2000, JACK BERNHARDT spent two weeks in Ghana with Elon College faculty developing courses in globalization he taught later that year. He also taught "The Culture of Country Music" at UNC-CH during the fall semester of 2000, and he continues to serve as country and traditional music critic for Raleigh's News and Observer.

HARIHAR BHATTARAI has completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology at UNC. He has also founded the Himalaya Institute in Kathmandu, Nepal, an organization devoted to education and social service which will help "individuals and organizations gain proper understanding of their physical and cultural environment and develop skills and experience for living in a globally interdependent, multicultural, harmonious society." For the next year he and SUNITA will live in Butler, PA, where Harihar will design environmental courses for the Pennsylvania Environmental Education Center. Their sons are both off to college, Aditya at Slippery Rock University and Ashish at Wingate College.

PADDY BOWMAN works as the coordinator of the National Task Force on Folk Arts in Education. She's working on an educator's guide to the NEA Heritage Fellow Collection. Over the past two years she's written a couple of folklife education resources. The first, Louisiana Voices: An Educator's Guide to Our Communities and Traditions, won the 2000 Dorothy Howard Folklore and Education Prize from the AFS Education Section. The guide exists only on the Web at www.louisianavoices.org and is public domain so teachers, students, parents, and folklorists everywhere can adapt it for their own regions and interests. The second big project was for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and is called Sounds of History. It uses sound excerpts from Folkways archives to explore American history.

LARRY BRASHER is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy and Director of the Center for Values and Ethics at Catawba College in Salisbury, NC. He teaches courses in ethics and popular and folk religion. The Ethics Center sponsors monthly discussion groups for professionals and is currently focusing on race issues in the Rowan County area. He recently presented a paper on the Holiness Movement at Vanderbilt and has been working with the Nature Conservancy of Alabama to establish a preserve on his ancestral home in Etowah County, Alabama.

AMY BROWNis the Folklore Archivist at the Blue Ridge Institute in Ferrum, VA, where she is designing the database for the sound recordings and photograph collections. Her thesis, a discography of women in country music, is nearing completion—hopefully for December graduation. Along with her new job, she is also a newlywed—her husband, Kevin Hoschar, owns High Touch, a consulting and training firm.

SARAH BRYAN is an independent folklorist and oral historian, currently working as an interviewer for an oral history archive under development in Myrtle Beach, SC. She and her husband, Peter Honig, live and play oldtime music in Chapel Hill.

MIKE CASEY brought a second CD, The Pleasures of Hope, into the world this past year, on the Wizmak label. He has also been selected to appear on a new compilation CD, Masters of the Mountain Dulcimer. Mike continues to tour with the Celtic music quartet Cucanandy (that’s koo-kuh-nahn-dee), keeping a busy schedule across the U.S.

BILL CAUDILL is the Director of the Scottish Heritage Center and Instructor of the College Pipe Band at St. Andrews Presbyterian College. When he’s not administering the Center, teaching, or winning prizes as a professional competitor on the Scottish Highland bagpipe, he’s writing his thesis on the last Highland Scot emigration to N.C. in the late 19th century.

LEILA CHILDS has recently taken the position of Folklife Coordinator at the Oregon Folklife Program at the Oregon Historical Society. Her first task is to coordinate the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, which is eight years old and will shortly award ten new stipends to folk artists. She’s enjoyed traveling and getting acclimated to her new state, and has settled in Portland near Georgia Weir.

"Gathering in the City!", the exhibit KATHLEEN CONDON developed for the Brooklyn Children's Museum, opened in 2000. Since leaving the Museum, Condon's clients have included: Appalshop, Fund for Folk Culture, MSU Museum, Museums at Stony Brook, Arts Council for Wyoming County, New York Folklore Society, Brooklyn Historical Society, Missouri Folk Arts Program, Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich, Connecticut, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Eldridge Street Synagogue Project, Program for Immigrant Traditional Arts, Mind-Builders Creative Arts Center, the 2001 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Community Works, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts.

MOLLY CONRECODE has left the N.C Museum of History and is a Folklorist for CITYFOLK in Dayton, OH., where she has spent much of her time helping to produce the last two National Folk Festivals (for the 1996 Festival CITYFOLK received the Dawson Award from the Arts Presenting Association; the previous winner was the Kennedy Center). Last year the NFF attracted 75,000 people; this year there are eight programming areas and three exhibits. Molly has been doing fieldwork on games and play in local schools; at the Festival some of her fourth and fifth graders will be teaching the visitors "the finer aspects of playground games."

CECE CONWAY is currently an Associate Professor of English at Appalachian State University where she teaches courses in Southern literature, Appalachian Studies, and folklore. In November of 1995 the University of Tennessee Press published her African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia. Several of her films—Julie: Old Time Tales of the Blue Ridge, A Visit With Fiddler Tommy Jarrell, and Sprout Wings and Fly—have appeared over the last several years in the Visions Series on WUNC-TV. In 1998 Smithsonian Folkways will issue the CD Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia. She is also currently working half-time with Scott Odell for the Smithsonian on the multimedia, computer-based exhibit The Banjo: America’s First Musical Invention, which will stand on the floor of the National Museum of History in Washington.

SUSIE CRATE just completed her Ph.D. with UNC’s Curriculum in Ecology on the cultural, ecological, and economic impact of diamond mining in the Vilyuy regions of the Sakha Republic (where she did her Folklore M.A. research). She’s now off to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she’ll spend the next two years with a postdoc sponsored by the Institute of Environmental Sciences, the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, and the Geography Department.

KRISTEN DACHLER is a dual citizen with one foot in the United States and the other in German Switzerland. Her hybrid identity has influenced her academic interests, which include bicultural ethnography, classic and experimental literary tales, and a graduate minor in Medieval Studies. Currently she is busy researching Middle High German legal texts for historian Judith Bennett and just designed a new website (this one!) for UNC's Curriculum in Folklore. Future research will take her back to St. Gall, Switzerland with her husband Elmar and their three-year-old son Roland, also Swiss-Americans.

JAN DAVIDSON is Director of the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, N.C. This year the Folk School opened its History Center, with exhibits and archives, and received the Award of Distinction from the American Craft Council. Jan also plays fiddle with the Dog Branch Cats

AMY DAVIS received her Masters degree in 1998 and married carpenter and fiddler Jon Newlin a few weeks later. She did initial fieldwork in 7 counties for the Blue Ridge Music Trail project for the NC Arts Council Folklife Section. In 1999 she began work in the new position of Folklife Assistant at the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC-CH. And most importantly, on December 19, 2000 at 8:33 pm, Iris June Newlin was born. Amy wrote shortly thereafter, "Mom and Dad are harried, but fine, and in love with the infant child."

DAVID DEACON is still in grad school at Syracuse, working on a dissertation on the pulp and paper industry in Northern New England, 1870-1930 and its impact on four towns: Bellows Falls, VT, Franklin, NH, and Rumford and Livermore Falls, Maine. He is looking particularly at issues such as architecture, sense of place, and organized labor.

DAN ELLISON remains involved in the North Carolina Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and gives occasional talks on arts related legal issues. Last spring he purchased a building in downtown Durham and renovated it—over 20 artists now have their studios here, and three gallery spaces are occupied as well. His next takeover target is bigger—the Trust Building, Durham’s first skyscraper, erected by financier John Sprunt Hill in 1905. When it opens, it will contain offices, an antiques mall, residential condos . . . But get your bid in soon.

After finishing the fieldwork for the Delmarva Project, KELLY FELTAULT spent the last 2 years in the crab picking factories of the Eastern Shore documenting the industry for a permanent exhibit. The publication of an oral portrait in booklet form was expected in Spring 2001. She also helped Meri Lobell in New Jersey do the initial fieldwork for "The Cultural Thread," documenting the embroidery factories of New Jersey and the East European embroidery traditions of the area. She also planned the Folk Heritage Collections in Crisis Symposium in December, 2000.

JOAN FENTON lives in Charlottesville, Virginia and has 9 retail stores, 7 of which feature traditional and contemporary handcrafts. She is about to leave the board of the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance, and is the chair of the Charlottesville Board of Architectural Review and chair of Stagelights, a non-profit children's theatre in Williamsburg. This summer will be her 19th year at the Augusta Heritage Workshop, and she will coordinate Blues Week for them.

JILLIAN FRIEDMAN has been working as a counselor and teacher of secondary students since moving to Florida in 1992. Most recently, she worked as an ESL teacher in a bilingual Vietnamese program for middle school students. In 1999, she coordinated a year-long folklore project at her school called "All About Us: A Celebration of Our Folklife". Over 900 students conducted fieldwork among their peers, families, and communities. The project culminated in a two day festival that combined performances by community groups and student presentations of fieldwork. As of August, 2000, she switched schools, and teaches middle school English at an innovative K-8 charter school called Lake Eola Charter School.

In 1999, PAT GANNT joined the English Department at Utah State University, where she teaches American literature and English education. Prior to that she taught at Dickinson State University. She also ran a regional teacher's center there. Recent projects include articles on regional writers, southern foodways, August Wilson's plays, and oral histories from the Federal Writers' Project. She took the Spring, 2001 semester off to complete her book on FWP interviews with southern women, a project that began in Terry Zug's narrative class and will conclude in the Library of Congress archives.

KENNETH M. GEORGE moved to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison following a year of research leave at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is affiliated with the University's Folklore Program, the UW-Madison Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and the Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle. Ken continues to work on contemporary Indonesian Islamic art (see recent articles in Journal of Asian Studies, and Ethnos), and on multidisciplinary approaches to violence (he organized a conference on "Violence, Suffering, Image" at the University of Oregon, 1999; and delivered a keynote address on "Violence and the Indonesian Public Sphere" at Cornell University in 2000).

KEVIN HARTER has been "frantically busy" since leaving Chapel Hill. For starters he has been teaching at James Madison University—Intro to Folklore, Cultures of Appalachia, and a course on traditional medicine. On top of all this, he took on the duties of Curator at the Shenandoah Valley Folk Art and Heritage Center for a year and organized two exhibits. But that was not enough, so he also led a seven week Elderhostel program on the traditional music of the Shenandoah Valley.

JILL HEMMING announces the birth of mellow second boy, Benjamin who arrived in December, 1999. Professionally, Jill participated in the AFS Public Folklorist Residency at Utah State where she researched Mormon Genealogy Quilts and shared her findings at the Memphis AFS meeting. Through a Folklife Documentation Grant, documented her favorite fishermen, the Davenport Brothers. Alicia Rouverol and Jill continued their work on a 3-year collaborative oral history project with the Northeast Central Durham community, documenting the impact of Latino migration into historically African-American neighborhoods. Jill has also consulted with a local non-profit, Student Action with Farmworkers, to train summer interns in conducting fieldwork projects with farmworkers and settled Latinos. Finally, working with a team of community members and a UNC epidemiologist, Jill has documented the experiences of Lumbee breast cancer survivors.

JULIE HENIGAN writes that "I always feel embarrassed that I still don’t have a real job, . . . but I guess I can pad the letter with other things!" Well, she’s certainly keeping busy. She played at the Oatlands Celtic Festival in Leesburg, VA, in June and has a six-week tour through the U.K. starting in September. She’s also working on a CD version of her album American Stranger and a guitar book/CD (An Introduction to DADGAD Guitar Playing). Ireland remains on her mind. Last summer she spoke at the Willie Clancy Summer School and gave a paper which will be published. And she’s recently been invited to come do a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Limerick. Altogether, she dreams of being a folklorist again, "but you won’t find me citing Foucault or Deridas!"

LAUREL HORTON, visited Sweden in 2000 to research the place of quilts within American and Swedish crafts revivals. She presented the paper "An 'Old-Fashioned' Quilting in 1910," at the American Quilt Study Group 2000 Seminar, in Nebraska. The paper was published in Uncoverings 2000. Laurel consulted with the American Folklife Center for an online exhibition, "Quilts and Quiltmaking in America." She also serves as a consultant for the Mary Black Foundation in Spartanburg, which displays a collection of quilts. Laurel markets and presents grants workshops as an independent contractor for the Polaris Company. In August, she worked with Jim White, of ARTS North Carolina, Inc., to provide grants training to arts groups in five locations across North Carolina.

ELIZABETH HOWELL has recently moved to Portland, Oregon where she isserving as Assistant Professor and Business Administration Librarian at Portland State University.

TATIANA IRVINE was born and raised on Long Island and had many opportunities to travel and live abroad during her childhood. These travels, along with a lifelong involvement with music, have been the primary influences on her current pursuit of folklore. Tatiana graduated from Wesleyan University in 1993 as a music major with a focus in West African music and culture. Her past experiences in folklore include three internships in the Office of Folklife at the Smithsonian, as well as extensive travel in both Ghana and India studying music and documenting folklife.