Biography

Over the course of three decades, Kim Pearson has built a career using professional communications to help people, organizations and communities bridge differences and create new opportunities.

A graduate of Princeton University,  Pearson began her professional career as a writer and lay counselor for the Cancer Information Service at the Fox Chase Cancer Center.  She then matriculated through New York University’s graduate program in journalism, where she earned the Hillier Krieghbaum Science Writing Award. After NYU,  she became a science writer for Bell Laboratories, where she produced award-winning articles for several company newspapers and magazines. Pearson also began a freelance magazine writing career that would lead to bylines in Black Collegian, Black Enterprise, Newsday, The Crisis, Newsday, The Revealer, The Princeton Independent, Princeton Alumni Weekly, Quarterly Black Review of Books and  Emerge.

Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the English Department at The College of New Jersey, where she teaches courses in writing and reporting for journalism and interactive multimedia.  She is a co-founder of TCNJ’s Interactive Multimedia Major, and advisor to Unbound, an online newsmagazine that was first conceived in her magazine writing class in 1996, and which has published continually ever since.  She also advises TCNJ’s award-winning magazine club, Ed@TCNJ, as well as the campus chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. She is past advisor to TCNJ’s award winning student newspaper, The Signal.

Former President Clinton and Kim Pearson

Pearson’s current interdisciplinary research and practice is focused on creating and sustaining models for civic engagement in an environment that has upended traditional journalism and civic culture.

That practice includes publishing a blog, Professor Kim’s News Notes, from 2003-9, providing reporting and informed analysis on politics, culture and media criticism. From 2006 to the present, Pearson has served as a contributing editor for media and law for BlogHer.com, a major online community for women bloggers, where she was integrally involved in coverage of the 2008 election.  She is also a contributor to Poynter.org’s E-Media Tidbits blog.

Pearson also collaborates with colleagues in computer science and interactive multimedia to help writers and storytellers become better computational thinkers, and to help aspiring computer scientists become better communicators.  This work includes helping to conceive the  content management system for Unbound magazine, and being part of an interdisciplinary faculty team that created and executed TCNJ’s videogame development curriculum. That curriculum was initially created with support from Microsoft. Currently, she is the co-PI of the Broadening Participation in Computing via Interactive Journalism for Middle Schoolers NSF grant program.   She is also co-Principle Investigator for a second NSF grant, Distributed Expertise in Computing with Connections to the Arts, under the aegis of the cPATH program.

Interview with Rep. Dennis Kucinich at a 2007 Democratic Presidential candidates forum at Howard University. Photo credit: Laurie White. Used with permission