Laurie Hertzel to visit MSUM

Writer's Block | April 19th, 2017

This Monday journalist and author Laurie Hertzel will be at MSUM to promote her memoir News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist published by the University of Minnesota. This book won the Reader’s Choice Award at the Minnesota Book Awards back in 2011.

There will be an informal meet-and-greet at noon, followed by a reading and book signing at 7:30pm. Both events will take place in Room 205 in the Comstock Memorial Union. In between, she will be a guest on KDSU-FM, 91.9 FM, hosted by Doug Hamilton, from 3 to 4pm.

The following Tuesday, Hertzel will be at MSUM’s library, hosting a masterclass from 9 to 11am. All of these events are free and open to the public.

News to Me chronicles Hertzel’s humble beginnings as a journalist starting with the newspaper she founded as a preteen, which reported on birthdays and other local happenings.

She began her career with the Duluth News Tribune during the 1970s, when journalism was a male-dominated field. Though she started out writing obituaries, answering phones, and making coffee, she eventually became a prominent reporter and editor, traveling to Russia and Cuba and co-authoring two books about the Soviet Union.

News to Me is also the story of the Duluth News Tribune and its evolution from a small-city newspaper to a widely circulating publication ranging from the Twin Ports metropolitan area to northeastern Minnesota, northwestern Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. This growth in business was made possible by a team of Midwestern journalists, who Hertzel portrays as talented, determined, and passionate about their profession.

After eighteen years with the Duluth News Tribune, Hertzel moved to the Twin Cities and became a writer and editor for Minnesota Monthly magazine. She currently lives in St. Paul and works at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Hertzel has served on the faculty of the Nieman Conference on Narrative Editing and spoken at Harvard University. She has also been a writer-in-residence at the James Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, and a Duke Fellow at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Raleigh News & Observer described News to Me as “a charming and wistful memoir” that “engagingly evokes this romantic world while also tracking its decline in the age of the Internet.” Kansas City Star has said, “The story told here is not about the death of print but the power of story.”

YOU SHOULD KNOW

Laurie Hertzel Masterclass

Tuesday, April 25, 9-11am

Livingston Lord Library, MSUM

1104 7th Ave S, Moorhead; 218-477-2922

Free and open to the public

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