Alex Kotlowitz
Alex Kotlowitz has long focused on issues of race, immigration, poverty and children. His first book, There Are No Children Here, traced the lives of two brothers growing up in a Chicago public housing complex. The book sparked a national discussion about the realities of life for the children in America's inner cities. It's included on the New York Library's list of the 150 most important books of the 20th century and was adapted as a made-for-TV movie by Oprah Winfrey.
In The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death and America's Dilemma, Kotlowitz wrote about the racially charged death of a Michigan teenager. It was awarded the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Nonfiction. Never a City So Real is an ode to Chicago, his adopted hometown, and the people who live there.
Kotlowitz—visiting writer-in-residence at Northwestern's Center for the Writing Arts and senior lecturer at the Medill School—is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and to public radio's “This American Life.” With Amy Dorn, he co-authored “An Unobstructed View,” a play that premiered in 2005. For ten years, he was a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal.
Kotlowitz, who's the recipient of six honorary degrees, has received numerous honors for his work, including a Peabody Award, a George Polk Award and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.
Dorothy Roberts, JD
Dorothy Roberts is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law, with joint appointments in African American Studies, Sociology, and the Institute for Policy Research. She has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of race, gender, and class on legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. She is author of the award-winning books Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty; and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, as well as more than 70 articles in books and scholarly journals, including The Harvard Law Review, The Stanford Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal. Professor Roberts serves on the boards of directors of The Black Women’s Health Imperative, The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and Generations Ahead. In addition, she is a member of the Braam Foster Care Oversight Panel in Washington State and the Standards Working Group of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Professor Roberts is currently studying the neighborhood-level effects of racial disparities in the child welfare system and completing a book project on the politics of race consciousness in biotechnology, law, and social policy.
Panelist Biographies
Susan Avila, RN MPH
Susan Avila has worked as a registered nurse for over thirty-five years. She completed her Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing at St. Louis University and her Masters degree in Public Health at University of Illinois. Ms. Avila has worked in a broad spectrum of nursing roles from community health nurse within the Henry Horner Chicago Housing Project to providing nursing care in community based health centers and acute care institutions. She was a member of Mayor Harold Washington’s administration and today she serves as the Trauma Nurse Coordinator and Nurse Epidemiologist at John H. Stroger Hospital. She currently directs the Department of Trauma’s Surveillance Unit and several grant funded violence and injury prevention programs. She continues her direct patient care activities by serving as a bi-lingual educator in the specialty Diabetic Clinic at Fantus Health Center.
Marie Crandall, MD, MPH
Marie Crandall is an Assistant Professor of Surgery and Preventive Medicine in the Division of Trauma and Critical Care at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She is originally from Detroit, MI, a product of Head Start and local public schools. Dr. Crandall completed her Bachelor’s Degree from U.C. Berkeley in 1991, and obtained her M.D. in 1996 from U.C.L.A. She completed a General Surgery residency at Rush University & Cook County Hospital in 2001, and in 2003, completed a Trauma & Surgical Critical Care Fellowship at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, WA. During her fellowship, she obtained a Masters in Public Health from the University of Washington. Dr. Crandall performs emergency general and trauma surgery, staffs the SICU, and is an active health services researcher. Dr. Crandall is a Robert Wood Johnson Faculty Clinical Scholar studying “Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in Trauma Care”.
Darren R. Gitelman, MD
Darren Gitelman is a behavioral neurologist who takes care of people with a variety of cognitive disorders. He is an associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He serves on the editorial boards of NeuroImage and Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. His research is concerned with the functional neuroimaging of brain and behavior disorders including memory dysfunction, dementias, and visual-spatial processing.
Michelle Gittler, MD
Michelle Gittler is medical director of the spinal cord injury program, associate medical director for academic affairs, medical director of the Anixter substance abuse program, and residency program director at Schwab, a program of the University of Chicago, and is associate professor of surgery at the University of Chicago. Dr. Gittler has been working on the near Westside since she graduated from the rehabilitation Institute in 1992. She has worked with individuals who have been disabled secondary to violence, and has spoken extensively on the differences between violently acquired spinal cord injury and other etiologies of injury. Recently, Dr. Gittler has been providing rehabilitation care for political refugee's with disabilities (many of these as a result of violence from warfare). Additionally, Dr. Gittler works with the undocumented Hispanic population who have been disabled secondary to violence, but are unable to access rehabilitative services anywhere else.
Reverend Susan Johnson
Susan Johnson is in her twenty-fifth year as Senior Minister at Hyde Park Union Church on Chicago’s Mid South Side. She is also Treasurer of Centers for New Horizons, a holistic social service agency in Bronzeville which specializes in early childhood education and foster care, youth work, job training, and the prevention of elder abuse, and she is the chief administrator for the Hyde Park & Kenwood Hunger Programs. For six years, 1993-1999, Hyde Park Union Church, under Rev. Johnson’s leadership, conducted a public awareness campaign regarding very high levels of violence on the South Side. Educated at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Rev. Johnson is ordained in the American Baptist Churches, USA. She is co-author with Herbert Anderson of Regarding Children, which focuses on raising children in community.
Melvin Juette
Melvin Juette is a Community Service Coordinator in the Dane County District Attorney’s Office in Madison, Wisconsin. He founded the Milwaukee Bucks Wheelchair Basketball Team, which has advanced to the National Wheelchair Basketball Association (NWBA) championship tournament every year and won the National Championship title in 2002. Mr. Juette served on the board of directors of the NWBA from 2001 till 2009, and, with five gold medals in international team competition to his credit, he was recently named assistant coach of the United States Men’s National team. With Ronald J. Berger he wrote Wheelchair Warrior: Gangs, Disability, and Basketball (Temple University Press, 2008), an account of his life in Chicago, his gang-related injury, and his work to make sports and recreation available to people with disabilities.
Romana Hasnain-Wynia, PhD
Romana Hasnain-Wynia is a national expert in health care disparities research. She is the director, Center for Healthcare Equity and Associate Professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Prior to joining Northwestern University, Dr. Hasnain-Wynia was the Vice President, Research for the Health Research and Educational Trust/American Hospital Association. She serves as the principal investigator of a number of studies focusing on research, implementation, and evaluation projects using multi-method approaches to reduce disparities in health care and to examine the health care safety net. She is a member of the evaluation team of the Robert Wood Johnson initiative, Aligning Forces for Quality and is leading the disparities/equity component of the evaluation. Dr. Hasnain-Wynia was the lead author of the HRET Disparities Toolkit for Collecting Race, Ethnicity, and Primary Language Data from Patients, which has been endorsed by the National Quality Forum. She serves on a number of national expert advisory panels and is a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Standardized Collection of Race/Ethnicity/Language Data for Healthcare Quality Improvement. Dr. Hasnain-Wynia is a Senior Associate Editor for the journal, Health Services Research.
Zale Hoddenbach
Zale Hoddenbach was born and raised in Chicago Il. For over fifteen years, he was a member of a Chicago Hispanic Street Gang and moved up in rank at an early age. He subsequently served ten years in the State Penitentiary for gang related crimes. He then decided to change his ways and be a positive influence in the communities. For the past ten years, Mr. Hoddenbach has been working with youth on different sides of the equation, in classrooms and on the streets, to prevent violence. He spends his days with the Boys and Girls Club (which is funded by All State) speaking in the Chicago Public Schools to over 600 students a week. At night, he works for Cease-Fire as a Violence Interrupter who works with key individuals in gangs to preventively stop initial violence or retaliations. By working with both programs, Mr. Hoddenbach has helped the young and old change their lives to become positive members of society.
Nathaniel Howard
Nathaniel Howard is founder and president of the MAD DADS Chicago Chapter which was established in 1997. MAD DADS, an acronym for Men Against Destruction Defending Against Drugs and Social-disorder, plans activities designed to promote and demonstrate positive images of fathers engaging and protecting community, youth, and families. He has been a member of the Cook County State's Attorney's African-American Advisory Council and serves on the Austin Education Network Committee. Among his many honors, Mr. Howard was named outstanding father and role model in the community by the Austin Gala Committee and honored for his dedicated, compassionate service by the Westside Health Authority.
Sokoni T. Karanja, PhD
Sokoni Karanja is the Founder, President & CEO of Centers for New Horizons, located in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Dr. Karanja has over four decades of experience of community building leadership. Prior to founding Centers, Dr. Karanja organized communities and developed programs in Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Boston. He holds a PhD from Brandeis University, conducting his dissertation research in Tanzania, and he has three Masters degrees. Dr. Karanja serves on several citywide boards, co-chairs the Child Welfare League of America’s Community Building Advisory Committee, and is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the coveted MacArthur “genius” award in 1994.
Gary Slutkin, MD
Gary Slutkin is the founder and Executive Director of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention. Dr. Slutkin is a physician trained in infectious disease control and reversing epidemics. He has worked extensively with tuberculosis and AIDS, in both the U.S. and abroad. In 1995, he began working with Chicago leaders to develop a public health-based approach to stopping violence. This new strategy, CeaseFire, has successfully reduced shootings and killings in more than 16 communities and was recently documented as scientifically effective by a U.S. Department of Justice-commissioned study. Dr. Slutkin’s new approach to reducing violence using behavior change and epidemic control methods has produced some of the most effective data ever shown for reducing violence—and he has been called upon from Los Angeles to Africa to Iraq to replicate and adapt this approach. Dr. Slutkin remains an adviser to the World Health Organization.
Brad Stolbach, PhD
Brad Stolbach, Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, is Supervisor of Trauma-Related Psychological Services at La Rabida Children’s Hospital and Director of La Rabida’s Chicago Child Trauma Center, a National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) site whose primary mission is to provide expert trauma-focused psychological services to urban African American children. He has worked with traumatized children for over 25 years, is Immediate Past President of the Board of Directors of Children’s Advocacy Centers of Illinois, a member of the Illinois Childhood Trauma Coalition, and serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma, and the Journal of Child and Adolescent Trauma. Within the NCTSN, he has served on the Developmental Trauma Disorder DSM-V Task Force and the Steering Committee, chaired the Strategic Planning Group, and served as co-chair of the “Race” & Urban Poverty Work Group.
