The 2005 Hileman Award winner is Karen Brown Dunlap. Dr. Dunlap is president of The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, as well as a Trustee at Poynter and a member of the Board of Directors of the Times Publishing Company. As a teacher of writing, she has led seminars throughout the nation and abroad, including sessions in South Africa. She is co-author of The Effective Editor with Foster Davis, and co-author of The Editorial Eye with Jane Harrigan. She was editor of the Institute’s Best Newspaper Writing series, and continues as a regular contributor. Dunlap, who has twice served as a Pulitzer Prize jurist, publishes articles on award-winning writing. She was a reporter for the Macon News and the Nashville Banner, and staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times.
After 10 years of teaching journalism at Tennessee State University in Nashville, she joined the journalism faculty at the University of South Florida in Tampa in 1985. She began her tenure at Poynter in 1989.
Dunlap is a graduate of Michigan State University and Tennessee State University, and she received her PhD in mass communications from the University of Tennessee in 1982. She is married to Hank Dunlap and has four children and seven grandchildren.