Professional Development
Speakers and panelists will include:
SATW President Catharine Hamm
Catharine Hamm has been Travel Editor at the L.A. Times since 1999; before that she held editorial positions at the Salinas Californian, San Bernardino County Sun, and Kansas City Star.
Photo courtesy of LA Times
Elizabeth Harryman
Elizabeth Harryman is the Travel Editor of Westways, the magazine of the Auto Club of Southern California, as well as Travel Editor of six other AAA magazines that reach markets from New England to Hawai‘i. With her husband, Paul Lasley, she also cohosts two daily radio shows that are broadcast to one million listeners in 145 countries on American Forces Network and are podcast at OnTravel.com and on iTunes. As freelancers, Elizabeth and Paul wrote a travel-and-dining column that ran for 10 years in the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, and other newspapers and are former travel correspondents for NBC’s Today show.
Suzanne Brown
Suzanne Brown spent more than three decades as a features writer, editor and manager before taking a buyout from The Denver Post in 2016. Since then, she’s been freelancing and editing for a variety of news organizations and magazines including Mountain Living and Colorado Expression. Prior to working at the Post, Suzanne was style editor at The Rocky Mountain News and the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer.
Aaron Linsdau
Aaron Linsdau is only the second American to ski alone from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole, setting a world record for the longest expedition ever for that trip. He has walked across Yellowstone National Park in winter, crossed the Greenland tundra alone, has trekked through the Sahara desert, attempted to climb Denali solo, and successfully climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Patricia Calhoun
Patricia Calhoun has the world’s shortest resume. She co-founded Westword, Denver’s News and Arts Weekly, in 1977, after graduating from Cornell University; she’s been the editor of the paper ever since. She’s also the editor of the 24/7 westword.com, as well as the bimonthly Chronicle, Westword’s marijuana magazine. As the former president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, she once scored an unexpected interview with former President Bill Clinton in front of a thousand people (while she was wearing flip-flops). Among the awards she’s received is first place for column writing in the national Society for Professional Journalists contest in 2015.
Cara Cannella
Cara Cannella is a writer, editor, and event moderator based in Brooklyn, NY. For the content marketing startup Contently, she contributes to Marriott’s Travel Brilliantly, American Express Open Forum, and other brand publications. As founding editor-writer of the Penguin Random House site Signature, she covered biography and memoir across publishers, and she’s been a research editor for Bon Appétit, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. She has an MFA in creative writing (nonfiction) from The New School and taught writing at F.I.T. (Fashion Institute of Technology).
Janna Graber
Janna Graber is a Colorado-based journalist, editor and producer. She has written for more than 45 publications, including Parade, Outside, Redbook, Reader’s Digest, The Chicago Tribune and many others. She is the editor of three travel anthology books: A Pink Suitcase: 22 Tales of Women’s Travel (World Traveler Press), Chance Encounters: Travel Tales from Around the World (World Traveler Press) and Adventures of a Lifetime (World Traveler Press) and is currently the managing editor at Go World Travel Magazine