Raleigh Public Record

Kate Pattison spent eight years working as an archaeologist in Vermont, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and the Bahamas, and currently works for the Society of St. Andrew, a hunger-relief organization in Durham, NC. She wrote a weekly historical column about Raleigh, North Carolina, for the Raleigh Public Record in 2009. Pattison occasionally writes blog posts, newsletter features and news summaries for the non-profit environmental group Toxic Free North Carolina. She also works with the Come To The Table hunger forum, a joint project of the Duke Endowment Council of Churches and the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI). She is pursuing a certificate in Sustainable Agriculture from Central Carolina Community College in Pittsboro, North Carolina.

Dick J. Reavis is a magazine writer (Texas Monthly, 1977-1990) and author who now teaches journalism in the English department at NCSU. He is also a Nieman Fellow (’90), a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and a veteran of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (Marengo County, Ala., 1965-66). His books include Conversations with Moctezuma (Wm. Morrow, 1990) and The Ashes of Waco (Simon & Schuster, 1995). He recruited, edited and translated Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant, by Ramon “Tianguis” Perez (Arte Publico Press, 1991.) Photo: Reavis speaks with a 13-year-old FARC guerrilla in Columbia in 2000.

Cat Warren is associate professor in the Department of English at North Carolina State University where she teaches in the journalism program and in the technical communications program. She was a newspaper reporter during the 1980s for The Sacramento Bee and The Hartford Courant, among others. She has garnered several reporting awards for investigative reporting, as well as education coverage. She has also worked as an editor at a university press and at two university news bureaus. She writes occasionally for the Independent. She has a master’s degree in journalism and a doctorate in communications

Yolanda D. McGill – General Counsel

Yolanda grew up in Raleigh, but ran off to New York University to pursue a journalism degree. Ultimately, she earned her B.A. in German instead. She received her J.D. in 1999 as a Clarence Darrow Scholar at the University of Michigan Law School and began practicing as an associate with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP in Washington, DC. McGill then left DC for Berlin, Germany, upon her selection as a Bosch Fellow, where she advised Deutsche Bank and consultants on U.S. law. In 2003 she was back in Raleigh combating predatory lending practices as a policy counsel, then senior policy counsel with the Center for Responsible Lending. Yolanda returned to Berlin in 2007 to work with Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, but was drawn back to Raleigh recently and is now living between Raleigh and Washington DC where she is senior counsel for the Fair Housing and Fair Lending Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.