• M.A. Journalism, University of California Berkeley
• B.A. English, Albertus Magnus College
A longtime Anchorage writer and editor, Rosanne Pagano joined Alaska Pacific University in 2003 and advises the APU Journal campus newspaper. She is a former University of Alaska journalism assistant professor and teaches print journalism and general university courses in writing at APU.
A regular contributor to Alaska Magazine focusing on public lands issues, Pagano’s opinion columns have appeared in the Anchorage Daily News and online at Alaska Dispatch. She is a past editor of the Alaska Almanac and the Alaska Geographic Quarterly. A personal essay was anthologized in “Alaska Women Write.” In fall 2008 she was at work on an article about southwest Alaska’s Pebble Mine for National Parks Conservation Association magazine.
Pagano is a former Anchorage-based staff writer for the Associated Press. In 1989 she reported from Valdez for National Public Radio and Alaska Public Radio following the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Her reporting on Alaska’s $5 billion oil spill class action was heard on Canadian Broadcasting and the BBC.
Academic writing interests include the ways assessment may be used to enhance the teaching of writing and how to apply basics of journalism to improve student writing across the curriculum.
Rosanne Pagano was born in New Haven, Connecticut. Her first writing job was in the public relations department of Brookhaven National Laboratory, a high energy physics lab on Long Island, just eight months before the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident; Pagano recalls that her lifelong interest in journalism was sealed after observing firsthand the value of accurate, timely and professional reporting in the accident’s aftermath.
Pagano has worked at newspapers in Utah, California, and New Mexico. Her Alaska writing life has taken her from Juneau to Nome; from Adak Island in the Aleutians to Siberia; from the flanks of a still-warm volcano bordering Cook Inlet to an archaeological base camp in the Brooks Range.
“If student writers I work with have careers half as full as mine, my work is done,” she says.