Our Spotlight Award winner for November 2012 is Dorothy Carner!
Dorothy Carner is the Head of the Journalism Libraries and Adjunct Professor of Journalism at the University of Missouri- Columbia. She has been with MU in her current position for five and a half years.
Dorothy originally hails from Springfield, Missouri, where she graduated with her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Biology/Education. She completed her Master of Library and Information Science degree at the University of Texas at Austin.
I have reinvented myself a few times. I’ve been a secondary school life sciences teacher, an anatomy and physiology instructor at a parochial college and nursing school, an office manager for a financial marketing publisher, a business/reference librarian and now a journalism librarian. I loved each of these jobs, but I cannot imagine a more rewarding job than the one I now have at Mizzou.
In her leisure time, Dorothy watches college and professional sports including football, basketball, and baseball. She follows the teams from places she has worked as well as the teams with players from her children’s high school and colleges. This includes UT, UVA, USC, and MU. She is a fan of Cardinals baseball! Dorothy also enjoys reading (mostly nonfiction, but she says she splurges on good mystery now and then), listening to and playing music, walking, working with the Daniel Boone Regional Library Board, and vegging out in front of the TV with Masterpiece Theatre.
In addition to a cat named Fuzz, Dorothy has a husband and two children. Her husband, Bill, is a professor at Westminster College. Her son John (28) is in the American Film Institute’s Master of Arts program, and her daughter Kim (30) is a lawyer in the Master’s in Strategic Public Relations program at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication.
What’s the coolest place you’ve ever visited?
That’s a really hard choice, because almost every place that I’ve visited had something “cool” about it. For this moment, I’ll say Vienna because it has everything that I love in a city. Its historical treasures have been beautifully preserved. It is a classical cultural center with many wonderful art museums (home of Klimt and the Secessionists), theatres, cathedrals, palaces, Lipizzaner horses, and coffee houses serving mélange and Sacher Tortes, but it also has it’s funky side with Hundertwasserhaus and Der Weiner Prater, the park with the huge Riesenrad (Giant Ferris Wheel). It isalso home to the United Nations’ Vienna office and the International Atomic Energy Agency. It’s both beautiful and complex.
What fictional or real person would you enjoy having a drink with, and what drink?
I would love to have a Margarita with Molly Ivins, Ann Richards and Liz Carpenter, now all deceased. These three bigger-than-life Texas women (journalists and politicians) embodied the strong, tart-tongued and humorous women who broke twentieth century glass ceilings while skewering pompous politicians with incredible humor. They were friends and contemporaries and whenever they were together incredibly funny stories would emerge.
Congratulations, Dorothy!