May 2026
May 30 Field Trip: Bay Model tour with wetlands restoration expert
Join us for a private tour of the historic Bay Model, a warehouse-sized working hydraulic model of San Francisco Bay and the San Joaquin Delta where you can see the entire daily tide cycle in 15 minutes. Wetlands restoration expert John Callaway will point out tidal marshes drained by past operations, such as salt farms, and highlight restoration projects underway. He'll also detail the local impacts of sea level rise, sedimentation, subsidence, and other forces reshaping the bay. And we'll hear about the interesting history of this 3-D model built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1957. See the website for more details and registration.
Save the Date
June 27, 10 a.m. to noon – Save the date for a guided tour of Recology's San Francisco Transfer Station, a global leader in recycling and waste diversion. Full details to come in June.
Training, Conferences and Awards
May 18 marks the opening of submissions for the Rory Peck Awards, which recognize the talent and dedication of freelance journalists and filmmakers working in news and current affairs worldwide. It is one of the only awards in the world to exclusively highlight the work of freelancers. For more information, visit the award website.
May 31 is the deadline to apply to the Kurt Schork Memorial Fund, which offers three awards each year: one to a freelance journalist covering international news, one to a reporter living and working in a developing nation – or a country in transition – and one to recognize the unsung work of news fixers. The three winners each receive a US $5,000 cash prize. For more information, visit the fund website.
June 12 is the deadline to apply for the Muses & Melanin fellowship, the nation’s first fully funded, comprehensive, professional development career-accelerator practicum that helps talented creative writers of color establish sustainable literary careers in a #PublishingSoWhite industry. Designed for talented California creative writers of color who aspire to become professional authors, this 7-month fellowship is geared for people who do not yet have a lengthy list of publishing credits, are not under a publishing contract, do not have literary agent representation, and do not have a doctoral degree in English, Creative Writing, or Literature (a Master's degree in these subjects is fine, such as an MFA or MA). A Bachelor's degree is required. For more information, visit the fellowship website.
June 30 is the deadline to apply for CASW’s Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award. The award is intended to encourage young science writers by recognizing outstanding reporting and writing in any field of science. The winner will receive $1,000 and a certificate. For more information, visit the award website.
Now Open: Press registration is now open for the Ecological Society of America's Annual Meeting, the world’s largest gathering of professional ecologists. The 2026 meeting will run July 26-31 (Sunday through Friday) at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Utah. ESA invites press and institutional public information officers to attend for free (please see their credential policy).
NCSWA About Town
Andrew Fraknoi reports that The Worlds Within magazine has published his science-fiction story “Who Speaks for Earth.” It concerns a Congressional hearing about a future President, who had to destroy a radio telescope owned by a new religious group that insisted (without consulting anyone else) on answering a SETI message Earth received from an extraterrestrial civilization. The story can be read at: https://theworldswithin.net/who-speaks-for-earth/
Liese Greensfelder's book Accidental Shepherd: How a California Girl Rescued an Ancient Mountain Farm in Norway (University of Minnesota Press) was included on Literary Hub's list of 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 and on Library Journal's Stellar Selections/Best Books 2025 list. She's hoping a few fellow NCSWA members will join her at Book Passage in Corte Madera at 11 a.m. Saturday, July 11, for her presentation and slideshow about the year she spent living alone tending sheep and milking cows on a remote farm high above Hardangerfjord in the mountains of western Norway.
Christine Heinrichs will welcome the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council to Cambria for its May 15 meeting. The council has not met in Cambria, its southern boundary, in two years. Christine is the San Luis Obispo At Large member of the Advisory Council. Read her coverage of the H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak at Año Nuevo for Mongabay here.
Robin Meadows is a Pulitzer Center mentor for a UC Berkeley Journalism student reporting on Indigenous wildfire stewardship practices.
New Members
Eileen Campbell, Farallon Media, Pacifica
Meghan Crebbin-Coates, UC Berkeley, Briones
Avani Fachon, Point Reyes National Seashore Association, Petaluma
Helen Gibbons, US Geological Survey (retired), Mountain View
Meaghan Marohn, University of California, Berkeley, Oakland
Natalie Pedicino, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz