Have Pen, Will Travel
Welcome. Enjoy the adventures & misadventures of author Hank Nuwer with photos by wife Gosia Nuwer. Scroll down to very bottom of this main page for archived stories.
Bio: Hank Nuwer is the 2023 Alaska Columnist of Year and 2021 Ohio SPJ Columnist of the Year. His current books in print are Hazing: Destroying Young Lives, Wrongs of Passage and The Hazing Reader (Indiana University Press). Contact Professor Emeritus Nuwer at Hnuwer@franklincollege.edu
Hank pens weekly columns for the Cordova (AK) Daily Times and. teaches as an adjunct at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
A leading international expert on hazing in youth and adult groups, Hank Nuwer was honored to be named an “Alaska Champion” by the Alaska Children’s Trust in 2024. He has appeared as an actor in seven plays in Fairbanks in the last year, including Kris Kringle in The Miracle on 34th Street. His database on hazing deaths has been cited by many scholars and included in numerous scholarly publications and doctoral dissertations.
Gosia Nuwer photographs Alaska and its wildlife. She and Hank reside in Fairbanks, Alaska, with 20 acres in remote Alaska. She hold a master’s degree in Economics. She and her family hail from Warsaw Poland, and she is a U.S. citizen.
Hank Nuwer stories
General Willis P. Richardson: From Alaska Road Builder to Commander in Siberia
By Hank Nuwer Alaskans and Alaskan visitors by automobile evermore owe a debt to General Wilds Preston Richardson for building the roads more traveled. A native Texan, he was born March 20, 1861, three weeks before Confederate troops fired the first shot of...
Nevada Artist Robert Cole Caples
Robert Cole Caples is an enigmatic man. Seldom photographed, a lover of privacy: he became one of Nevada’s best-loved artists. By Hank Nuwer (1973) Much of the information available on Caples exists preserved in an intriguing essay by writer Walter Van Tilburg Clark...
EPA must determine extent of problem
By HANK NUWER, It’s a story as old as the story of human progress. A new discovery or innovation heralded for its efficacy is suspected to have harmful effects that require ingenuity on the part of researchers to find an antidote to the unintended causes. I consider...
Minto, Alaska
Weekends fly by all too fast, don’t they? One week ago Saturday my wife Gosia and I enjoyed the incredible vistas on the highway south of Delta Junction and north of Paxson. The next day I took Gosia for her first trip on the Dalton Highway, but we did not drive too...
Flying the unfriendly skies
lthough I fly frequently, I don’t know any unruly passengers. Except one, I admit. Me. This incident occurred the time I boarded a flight to Minneapolis and buried my nose in an airline magazine. Vaguely, as I read, the flight attendant greeted passengers with the...
T’is the Season for Forgiveness
By Hank Nuwer Likely you’ll be reading this column about the same time you and I will be contemplating what direction the elected president will take our great nation the next four years. Your candidate, my candidate, either won or...
Owning up to our mistakes
KA-BOOM! I labored at my computer on a bitterly cold February day as a black truck crashed into my Union City, Ind. house. The truck smacked the siding just beneath the window behind me. It shook up both the house and my composure. Hey wait! Is the driver pulling...
Why Alaska absolutely, positively needs a state hazing law: Cordova Times column
During the fall of 1993, the Cordova Times published a letter from a concerned parent of a Cordova High School ninth grader. The mother said she wanted an end to the “degrading” practice of hazing — or “freshman initiation” — as “the tradition” euphemistically was...
In Memoriam
Just a year ago our Aunt Sabina and friend Anna came to Fairbanks to visit us. Now, both are deceased from cancer. This column was about their visit. Enjoy What an exciting and beautiful week for our two relatives from London and Gosia’s aunt from Warsaw to visit us....