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Welcome to the Q1 2026 newsletter.
Welcome to the Q1 2026 newsletter.
CHAPTER NEWS
CHAPTER NEWS
AMWA North Central Earth Day Cleanup + Parkway Pizza Event
Upcoming Book Club on April 27, 2026
Publication Extenders Panel: Increasing the Reach of Scientific Research
Board of Director Updates
Call for Interviews!
FEATURE ARTICLES
FEATURE ARTICLES
Book Club Notes: Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
JOB BOARD
JOB BOARD
Announcements
CHAPTER NEWS
CHAPTER NEWS
AMWA North Central Earth Day Cleanup + Parkway Pizza Event
AMWA North Central Earth Day Cleanup + Parkway Pizza Event
Celebrate Earth Day with the AMWA North Central Chapter! We will be joining Friends of the Mississippi River (FMR) in their annual Earth Day Cleanup and picking up litter along the river gorge. After enjoying the spring air and environmental stewardship, join us for a slice of pizza at Parkway Pizza.
All are welcome to this event! Bring your neighbors, friends, and families. You need not participate for the entire activity. Join us when you can and leave when you wish.
Date/Time: Saturday, April 18, 9:30 AM – 12 PM (cleanup); lunch to follow
Cleanup location: TBD (near W River Pkwy and E 36th St/E 44th). Our group size will determine the check-in location; we will send an email with specific details the day before the event. If you have trouble finding us, text/call 651-271-3885.
Lunch Spot: Parkway Pizza, 4359 Minnehaha Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55406. Participants will purchase their own food and beverages.
Registration: Please let us know whether you will be joining us and how many people you will bring by Tuesday, April 14. Register via Zeffy. Please note that Zeffy asks by default for a donation. You do NOT need to submit a donation.
Additional details: Wear sturdy shoes and dress for the weather. You may wish to bring gloves. Please visit the Friends of the Mississippi River event page for further information.
Questions: Contact Angie Herron (angieherron@amwanorthcentral.org) or Angie Spartz (spar0019@umn.edu)
Upcoming Book Club on April 27, 2026
Upcoming Book Club on April 27, 2026
By Paul W. Mamula, PhD, Book Club Lead
Our next book club is only two weeks away! Please join the AMWA North Central Chapter's next virtual book club on Monday, April 27, at 7 PM (CDT) to discuss Like: A History of, like, the World’s Most Hated (and, like, Misunderstood) Word by Megan C Reynolds. As always, one need not have read the book to attend the meeting.
Please register for the event here: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/amwa-north-central-chapter-book-club
The book reviews the word, its origins, impact, and deeper meanings. Reynolds is an editor at Dwell magazine and has worked at other magazines as a writer. Her book provides a good, albeit peripatetic analysis. “Like” has become a verbal tic in modern conversations (just count how many times you hear it in conversations or interviews). I became sensitized to the word in graduate school, when a fellow graduate student used “like” instead of “about” and as a pause word rather than “er” or “um” in conversation. It was strange to my Midwestern ear. Its use and proliferation have fascinated me ever since. Please join us for a stimulating discussion.
Publication Extenders Panel: Increasing the Reach of Scientific Research
Publication Extenders Panel: Increasing the Reach of Scientific Research
By Tess Van Ee
Publication extenders, tools that make research more accessible, are an increasingly important part of modern scientific communication. Infographics, video abstracts, podcasts, plain-language summaries, blogs, social media posts, and visual and graphical abstracts can all help more people understand and apply the results presented in traditional publications.
This past February, members and guests of the AMWA North Central Chapter gathered to learn more about publication extenders. We heard from panelists Heather Renee Good, Publications Associate at the American Urological Association, Danielle Grospitch, Director of Marketing Communications and Strategy at Lockwood, and Brian Rifkin, physician and member of the NephJC nephrology journal club.
Presentation and discussion topics included:
How publication extenders help physicians understand and apply new research, improve public access to important scientific information, and support caregivers and patients.
Software tools medical communicators can use to create publication extenders.
Tips for creating publication extenders that are easy to understand, visually appealing, and, most importantly, effective.
To access the presentation slides, contact the chapter.
Board of Directors Updates
Board of Directors Updates
New Secretary
New Secretary
Rebecca Wienbar is a clinical pharmacist who is planning a transition to regulatory medical writing. She earned a BA in English from the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts, a MA in geography from Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs (with a thesis focused on access to health care), and a PharmD from the University of Colorado Anschutz Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. During pharmacy school, Rebecca co-authored two journal articles, published in Pharmacotherapy and Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning.
In her current role at Abbott Northwestern Hospital, Rebecca contributes to patient health as a member of the care team, where she manages medication therapy and makes evidence-based, patient-centered recommendations to optimize health outcomes. She is a member of the hospital Medication Safety Committee and is currently authoring a medication use evaluation focused on inhalers prescribed during hospitalization. She is excited to transfer her experience and skills to the regulatory writing profession, where she can contribute to teams developing innovative treatment solutions and improve health across the globe.
Rebecca joined AMWA in 2025 to learn more about medical writing and to make connections in the field, and she was appointed secretary of the North Central Chapter in November 2025. She recently completed the AMWA Certificate in Regulatory Writing Core Knowledge. She has found AMWA to be an incredibly supportive community with numerous opportunities for professional growth and education.
New Programming Co-Chair
New Programming Co-Chair
Angela Spartz is a medical writer/editor in the Hematology, Oncology and Transplantation Division of the University of Minnesota Department of Medicine. She earned her PhD in 2004, studying gene regulation in Caenorhabditis elegans and then spent 12 years in the UMN Plant Biology department investigating plant hormones and development. In 2016 she transitioned to breast cancer and ovarian cancer biology where she authored studies on progesterone signalling and the tumor micro-environment. She utilizes her knowledge of cancer biology, molecular and cellular biology, and genetics to assist faculty with grant writing and research publications. She occasionally dips her pen into creative writing endeavors, such as historical young adult novels and middle grade stories featuring young scientists.
Welcome to the team, Angela!
New Chapter Advisory Committee Representative
New Chapter Advisory Committee Representative
Our webmaster, Brittany Jaekel, took over from Naomi Ruff as our next Chapter Advisory Committee (CAC) representative.
Brittany Jaekel is a technical writer at Bright Research, a Minneapolis-based CRO specializing in medical devices. In her role, she provides crucial support to medtech companies aiming to meet their clinical research goals and bring their devices to patients and practitioners. She specializes in conducting clinical literature reviews, developing white papers, and creating scientific conference materials. She joined AMWA in 2024.
Brittany earned her PhD in Hearing and Speech Sciences from the University of Maryland-College Park, and her masters in Communication Sciences and Disorders from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She currently lives in a northwest suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul, following stints in Madison, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. In her personal life, Brittany is an award-winning poet and writer. She serves as the creative non-fiction editor at the Great Lakes Review (a literary magazine featuring authors connected to the Great Lakes region) and provides website support to several literary groups and authors based in the Twin Cities.
Call for Interviews!
Call for Interviews!
“Member Moment” column is looking for members to be featured in upcoming editions of the Newsletter. If you are interested in being interviewed and sharing your career journey, insights, and a few personal tidbits, please reach out to Tess van Ee (tssvanee@gmail.com) to get on the interview list. This is a great way to get to know our vibrant community and we appreciate your participation!
FEATURE ARTICLES
FEATURE ARTICLES
Book Club Notes: Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
Book Club Notes: Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
By Paul W. Mamula, PhD
Our virtual AMWA book club met on January 26, 2026, to discuss Yellowface by R. F. Kuang. The author also writes science fiction and fantasy; she signed her first book deal in college.1 Published in 2023, Yellowface is a satirical novel about writing and the book industry (see “Read A Good Book?”, AMWA North Central Chapter Newsletter, April 2024, for additional thoughts). We had a larger than usual turnout (7 of us) and a lively discussion.
The Book
The book is relatively short and reads fast. The story centers on the theft of an almost-finished manuscript by a successful Asian writer and the fallout after it is stolen. The main character, a white author, June Hayward, narrates the tale. When her Chinese American friend, Athena Liu, dies in a freakish accident, Hayward steals her unpublished manuscript about Chinese laborers during World War I. The women had been friends in college, but as writers, their careers diverged—Liu had become a successful author, while Hayward struggled to get her works published.
After reworking the stolen manuscript, Hayward sells it to a publisher and works with in-house editors to get the book released under her new pen name, Juniper Song. While working with the publisher’s Korean American editor, Candice Lee, Hayward must justify many elements in the manuscript; and Lee becomes increasingly hostile as the work progresses. The continuing conflicts proliferate, illuminating many aspects of authorship, publishing, white privilege, and race. Because Hayward is white, Lee accuses her of cultural appropriation. Hayward can’t admit that the original manuscript was written by an Asian woman and squirms as she justifies the theft (to herself), agrees to multiple reedits, and endures the novel’s marketing. The author-editor-publisher conflicts expose underlying problems within the publishing industry.
Reader Thoughts
The racial tension between Lee and Hayward was eye-opening, although character development was a little thin. Multiple readers noted that Hayward’s character made all the wrong choices throughout. Mary Knatterud said, “I found the novel compelling, yet kept wondering why Hayward couldn’t simply have proclaimed herself the posthumous editor of her friend’s manuscript.” June Oshiro and others echoed those sentiments, although most of us agreed that without the protagonist’s bad choices the novel would have suffered. Knatterud added that “the premise of Yellowface seemed shaky, although it’s true how jealousy, professional or personal, so often leads to disaster.“
Kuang draws some of the book from her own experience as an Asian American author. I found that the inside stories about the dirty little secrets of publishing, reviews, social media, and book sales give the novel an unusual tone and a good helping of gallows humor. The novel also has a few interesting takes on how books get sold, on the treatment of nonwhite authors, and on the paths to successful writing. Authors among us may find the takes true to life. Kuang presents her views in a recent interview,2 and other opinions of her novel are also available (favorable and less so).1,3
Quibbles
Although many of us use social media, some of us found the use without expansion of acronyms and initialisms throughout the novel a distraction. Knatterud provides a list:
ARC (p90), BTS (p100), BDS (p105), SJW (p107), PRC (p127), RT (p135), WAMF (p151), IDF (p153), SEO p169), and “an AMA“(p242). I could identify a few of those but agree that the number was a bit much. I would also note that this trend of not expanding is creeping into nonfiction writing as well, although some acronyms and initialisms do eventually become acceptable, eg, HIV, AIDS, DNA, ATM, to name a few. Some such as CD, require a context to distinguish among “compact disc,” “certificate of deposit,” and “celiac disease.”
In short, we liked Yellowface and found its riffs on online reviews and publishers’ relationships with authors delicious fun. Longtime book club attendees will be reminded of other books by authors with insider knowledge (eg, Allegra Goodman’s Intuition about misbehavior in science; Margaret Edson’s W;t, a play about cancer therapy).
More on Kuang
Kuang has also written the multiple-award-nominated Poppy War trilogy and the New York Times bestseller, Babel. Her latest novel is Katabasis, a fantasy tale in which 2 graduate students must set aside their rivalry and travel to Hell to save their professor’s soul. The author is currently pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature at Yale University.
References
1. Gadway HE. Yellowface Review: Fast-paced Critique at Times Falters. The Harvard Crimson. May 2, 2023 ‘Yellowface’ Review: Fast-Paced Critique at Times Falters | Arts | The Harvard Crimson [accessed February 15, 2023]
2. Buchwald RM. R.F. Kuang on Yellowface, Tokenization and Constant Comparison. Elle. May 22, 2023 R. F. Kuang on 'Yellowface', Tokenization, and Asian Representation [accessed February 15, 2024]
3. Williams CR. ‘Yellowface’ takes white privilege to a sinister level. NPR News May 15, 2023 R.F. Kuang's 'Yellowface' takes white privilege to a sinister level : NPR [accessed February 15, 2024]
JOB BOARD
JOB BOARD
Announcements
Announcements
Are you looking for work? You know someone who’s hiring? Please reach out! The job board will be updated in every issue of the monthly newsletter. If you’d like to add your name to this list, please contact Dora Miedaner (dora.miedaner@gmail.com).
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