NPR star talks voices with Sonoma students

SVHS grad Katayama teaches class at Presentation|

Sonoma Valley High grad Devin Katayama, class of 2001, has worked in radio at NPR and local public radio across the country. He is now back in the Bay Area living in the East Bay and covering equality issues for public station KQED.

Katayama earned a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College in New York City, and after college, he listened to a lot of NPR and volunteered at a radio station in Portland, Oregon. He returned to school to get a master’s in journalism Columbia College Chicago, where he was the recipient of the 2011 Studs Terkel Community Media Workshop Scholarship for his story on Chicago’s homeless youth.

Last week found Katayama back home in Sonoma speaking to students in the classroom of his friend Joel Kuschner. “Devin is one of my oldest friends,” explained Presentation School sixth grade teacher Kuschner. “My students are working on sentence fluency and honing in on intonation when they read aloud, and I thought it would be interesting for Devin to explain to them, and to show them, what he does.”

Katayama introduced the Presentation students to a field, radio journalism, that they didn’t know much about, said Kuschner. “Devin talked about his career, but also about how he uses voices to tell a story. Next our students do CD recordings of themselves reading book out loud.”

Katayama most recently won the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize, which is awarded by Boston public radio station WBUR in a salute to “a new generation of public radio journalists 35 years old and under, seeking to inspire them to stretch the boundaries of the medium.” His documentary “At Risk” was a moving look at issues facing some students in Louisville, Kentucky. (atrisk.wfpl.org.)

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