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alumni/ae page |
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February 2002 He calls himself a rainbow writer, a pretty term for the gritty job of reporting on race and ethnicity. Stephen’s writing emphasizes those groups whose voices rarely appear in the papers. Stephen, a senior writer for The Sacramento Bee, lives in California with his wife Colleen and their son Marco (age 6) and is currently on a Knight Fellowship for mid-career journalists at Stanford University. Colleen, a professional artist, has had the opportunity to study Creativity with famed Indian writer Vikram Seth and Irish Literature with celebrated Irish poet Evan Boland. Stephen is enjoying numerous classes including; Human Rights Documentaries, Religion in America, Conflict Negotiation, and his favorite, Fiction Writing. His professor, John L’Heureux, told him to “unleash yourself from the mast of facts.” Stephen has won numerous awards and fellowships. His series of the struggles of the Hmong refugees in America, “Orphans of History,” appears in the anthology, Best Newspaper Writing 2001. Last June, he was one of eight print journalists honored by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism for outstanding coverage of race and ethnicity in America—the only print reporter to win the honor twice. Columbia gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award and called “one of the finest teachers of beat reporting and ethnicity in America.” Stephen faced the many challenges of professional journalism armed with righteous indignation, incredible mentors, supportive parents, an outstanding education and a truckload of talent. All you have to do is read his esoteric and intense poetry in his high school yearbook to recognize the complex writer he was to become. Stephen credits BFS with providing him with the foundation for his career. “BFS played a huge role in shaping who I am now and my career path. I was at the first Earth Day celebration. I got to hear Julian Bond. There were anti-war protests. I am grateful to BFS for raising my social consciousness.” He also helped lead his varsity basketball team to a 3-14 record. Social awareness has always been a part of Stephen. His mother is a Jew of Ukrainian and Lithuanian descent. His father arrived here in 1954 with $400 in his pocket and a medical degree. His parents met in Rome but were forbidden to marry because his mother was Jewish. So they came to Brooklyn, where Stephen and younger sisters Lisa and Miranda were born. All of the children spent their formative years at BFS. Stephen reflects, “Diversity is my life. I believe there are many paths to enlightenment—the trick is to take what you need from each. I learned tolerance and a passion for justice from my parents and teachers at Brooklyn Friends, a Quaker school I attended for 13 years.” He says brilliant teachers such as Martin Norregaard, Alberta Magzanian, Don Knies, and Joel Martin laid the groundwork for his career as a writer and journalist. His sister Lisa ’75, a doctor, lives in Rome with her husband Paulo Narciso, a Major in the Italian Special Forces, and her 4-year-old daughter, Flaminia. Miranda ’78, is now chair of the board of Veritas, a non-profit corporation that monitors labor conditions in factories around the world. She’s married to Matthew Pilkington, a stock trader, and has two children, Dante, 7 and Alessandra, 3. Stephen went on to Hampshire College in Massachusetts, which, like BFS, has a progressive philosophy. He was editor of the “Hampshire Climax” and graduated in 1976. His first reporting job was in December 1976 for the St. Petersburg Times. He went on to write editorials for the Clearwater Sun in 1977. He spent a grueling year covering the night cops for the Dallas Times Herald. He calls it “boot camp for reporters.” Prospects looked up when he spent two years writing for the Sacramento Union from June 1978 to 1980. While there, he was mentored by K.W. Lee, a Korean-born investigative reporter who was among the first in the country to write insightfully about people of color. K.W. enlisted him to help write a series of articles that ultimately led to the reversal of the murder conviction of Chol Soo Lee, a wrongly accused Korean immigrant. He has spent much of his career shaking things up, making us open our eyes to injustice and inequality. While at the San Francisco Chronicle he wrote passionately about slumlords, police sex scandals, mass murders, and spy cases in Silicon Valley. In 1985 he was hired as a full time writer for the Sacramento Bee Sunday Magazine. He was with the magazine for four years before it folded. During that time he met and married Colleen Maloney, a professional artist and painter with a Master’s in English and English as a Second Language, and a BA in Fine Arts. He investigated a CIA front in Honolulu, corrupt bankers, doctors and insurance agents, and people who fake their own deaths, and wrote an expose on the true cost of the death penalty in California. Later, as columnist for The Bee, he went head-to-head with a 10-year-old spelling champion (e-mail him for what happened!). He spent the next several years on projects and investigations. He won the Freedom Forum Fellowship in Asian Studies in Hawaii, in 1991-92, then spent three months in Asia, producing 17 stories, including an investigation of the Three Gorges Dam project in China, the Burakamin, Japan’s untouchables, and a Buddhist Monk who was fighting to save Thailand’s northern forests from being chopped down by corrupt officials and business interests. In 1994 he became the Sacramento Bee’s Ethnic Affairs & Race Relations writer. “I didn’t take the Rainbow beat because I am an altruist, I took it because it would enrich my life. In 1994 I covered the first free elections in South Africa—16 days I wouldn’t trade for $10 million. At a Nelson Mandela rally in Soweto, I wept at the sight of 80,000 mostly black South Africans brimming with joy and hope instead of bitterness and vengeance. Apartheid ended without war and violence. That may have been the highlight of my career.” Among his proudest accomplishments is “Getting Along” a 1999 series on how people can cross racial and ethnic lines to become friends, and the barriers that can block those friendships. “The series provided a blueprint for overcoming fears and biases.” Stephen’s son Marco Antonio is his sidekick and travelling buddy. Together they have “boogied to blues in McClatchy Park, heard Yehudi and the Gefilte Fish at a Jewish fundraiser, watched Miwok Dancers at a California Indian Big Time, seen a Hmong shaman ride into the spirit world to heal an infant and marched three miles on Martin Luther King Day.”
To read samples of Stephen’s work, follow these links: The following is a poem written by Stephen for the 1972 BFS yearbook. Thirteen Years Is a Long Time Lunch boxes jammed with squashed-peanut-butter-jelly —Stephen Magagnini |
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