On behalf of the TAA Council, I am pleased to announce that Kim Pawlak was promoted to Executive Director on January 1, 2023, after Michael Spinella retired as Executive Director at the end of 2022.
Kim has worked for TAA in increasingly responsible roles for more than 30 years, most recently as Director of Publishing & Operations. She was instrumental in the development of TAA’s webinar program, Month of Motivation, Writing Gyms, and many other member benefits and services.
When I started writing anatomy and physiology textbooks in the 1980s, I never gave much thought to this last part of my adventure: my exit. And here I am, getting ready to step back and hand it all over to others in a few short years.
I’m finding out that some of my friends in TAA who have exited or are on the “offramp” are valuable counselors who freely give advice from their experience. Most recently, four colleagues presented their experiences at the 2022 TAA Conference in a panel called Time to Slow Down: Finding an Offramp from the Authoring Freeway. Even with all this help, my offramp has been a bit bumpy.
I once again find myself writing about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in textbooks. Not because I am—or feel myself to be—an expert in any aspect of DEI. Far from it. I am writing again because these concerns continue to weigh on me.
As a textbook author, I have a grave responsibility that goes beyond the obvious promise to deliver useful content for learning my subject. It is not only my descriptions and explanations and examples that affect my users—it is also the voice and vision that comes through those written words.
As authors who have recommitted ourselves to the ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion in our professional lives, one of the many struggles we face is making access to our content inclusive. However inclusive of race, gender, age, and other aspects of humanity our writing is, it is important to also ask ourselves whether all potential readers are able to access it.
As an author, I have often left accessibility issues completely in the hands the professionals among our publishing team. However, I realize more and more that, in many ways, that sort of inclusion starts with me.
Podcasting is an easily produced, but powerful, medium to connect with potential or current textbook users, scholars in your discipline niche, readers of your work, and potential consulting clients. It can extend your brand and expand your professional network.
I have been mentioning in TAA media that now is great time—the very best time—to start an academic podcast. A hundred thousand new podcasts are being launched each month and podcast listenership is growing rapidly as mobile devices add native podcast apps, and platforms such as Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, and Audible add podcasts to their offerings. We are just now at the point where “start a podcast” is about to overtake “start a blog” as a search term in Google Trends.
I’ll never forget that encounter I had with Kathy a number of years ago. Kathy and I are friends now, but I’d never met her before that moment when she introduced herself at our annual anatomy and physiology (A&P) teaching conference. She asked if I had a moment to chat about how illustrations are chosen for textbooks. As you can imagine, I love talking about the process of creating textbooks, so we stepped aside for a quick chat.
It turns out that she was chatting up as many A&P textbook authors as she could, including a few other TAA members, with a question that stemmed from her interest in diversity issues. Kathy wanted to know about the illustration process because she wanted to know why women and other groups were underrepresented.
