I just found this about my eldest daughter on the Evergreen Monthly site:
Kudos for Our EM Columnist
The honors keep stacking up for our columnist, Silja J.A. Talvi. Her story about the impact of three strikes sentencing on African-American men in Washington for ColorsNW Magazine was just named one of only three PASS Award winners for magazine writing. The National Council on Crime and Delinquency sponsored the awards; PASS stands for Prevention for a Safer Society. The other two winning stories appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine and New York Times Magazine.
Impressive company, Silja.
“I spent time with three amazing guys behind bars in the Monroe prison who are serving out life sentences for relatively minor and mostly non-violent felonies,” says Silja. “Pending legislation in Olympia right now would fix the more extreme portions of three strikes and give these guys a shot at freedom at some point in their lives.
“Having said that, I’ll go on the record as saying this kind of legislation was a politically convenient but (fiscally and socially) irresponsible idea to begin with. The toll in many lower-income African American communities has been just tremendous and terrible to witness, including here in Washington.”
Bob Condor is the editor of Evergreen Monthly
http://www.evergreenmonthly.com/2005/em2104/editorsnote2104.html
This past Friday and Saturday The Washington State Model United Nations took place at the University of Washington. As the year before, my third daughter Anna Talvi came home with an award for Best Speaker and gave the closing speech at the event. Just a few weeks before she had taken part in in the NHSMUN in New York, a national and international event. It was a non-competite conference at the actual U.N. with meetings taking place at the N.Y. Hilton.
Anna is in this state's wonderful Running Start program and will graduate this June from Seattle Central Community College with an AA, two-year degree, at 17. She is a member of two different honor societies and will start as a Junior at Western Washington University in Bellingham in the fall. It is important for her to be away but yet close to home (a 90 minute drive). This school is medium sized (around 11,000 students) and has its act together, even in its small but excellent Music Department.
All my four daughter are true musical talents but none of them have wanted to go to this field as a profession. I am grateful for that. It is important to give one's children an opportunity to be what they want and desire, instead of trying to make them follow in one's own footsteps. It feels good to be a proud father of such fabulous children. What could make a parent happier?
