March 5, 2003
BIRMINGHAM, AL — Five local women will be honored as the 2003 Outstanding Women by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) during an awards ceremony, 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 13, at the Bartow Arena Green & Gold Room, 617 13th Street South.
The UAB Women’s Center and the UAB Women’s Studies Program present the UAB Outstanding Women awards annually during Women’s History Month. The awards recognize female faculty, staff, students and community leaders who have served or mentored other women, taken a courageous stance or overcome adversity. Candidates for the award are nominated by Birmingham residents and selected by a committee of university women.
The 2003 winners are: Outstanding Faculty Member, Graciela S. Alarcón, M.D; Outstanding Administrator/Staff Member, Vonetta Flowers; Outstanding Graduate Student, Tina Harris; Outstanding Undergraduate Student, Glenda Jo Orel and Outstanding Woman in the Community, Jacqueline Meyer.
Graciela S. Alarcón, M.D., M.P.H., is professor of medicine in the Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology at UAB. She received her medical degree from the Univeridad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Perú, and a master’s in public health from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She completed an internship with Baltimore City Hospitals and a fellowship with Johns Hopkins before coming to UAB as a research fellow in 1980. In 2001, she was named the first holder of the Jane Knight Lowe Chair of Medicine in Rheumatology. Alarcón’s areas of research include studies on the etiopathogenesis of fibromyalgia and the predictors of disease outcome in rheumatic diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, with special emphasis on minority populations.
In addition to her numerous contributions as a researcher and physician, Alarcón has mentored numerous research fellows, clinical fellows, research assistants, graduate and undergraduate students at UAB, most of whom have gone on to receive advanced degrees and 50 percent of whom were women. She also has been a resource for women staff members, attending their monthly meetings and offering support and advice.
Vonetta Flowers, UAB’s assistant track coach and 1997 graduate, raced into history on February 19, 2001, when she and teammate Jill Bakken took the bobsledding gold medal in the sport’s Olympic debut in Salt Lake. Flowers, a track superstar at UAB, was the pusher and brake woman for the team. This Birmingham native also holds the distinction of being the first African-American athlete to win a Gold Medal at a winter Olympic competition.
Flowers was competing at the 2000 Olympic track and field trials in the long jump event when she saw a flyer for a USA Bobsled team tryout. She and her husband, Johnny Flowers, also an accomplished track star and UAB graduate, decided to tryout. Flowers quickly mastered the six-event test that included sprinting, jumping and throwing a shot, earning her a trial on the Olympic bobsled track. With only two weeks of training on how to push a bobsled, she and teammate Bonny Warner broke the world start record in October 2000, at Park City, Utah, site of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Later that season the team won four World Cup medals and finished the year ranked third in the world.
Tina Harris graduated from UAB in December with a master’s degree in English with an emphasis in creative writing. In 2002, she received the UAB Student Affairs Vice President’s Award. She is now an adjunct professor at UAB, teaching English composition and literature. She earned her bachelor’s degree in intercultural studies in 1995 from the University of Montevallo.
Harris is a prize-winning writer as well as an editor and mentor. She was editor-in-chief of the issue of UAB’s student literary magazine, Aura, which won the Associated Collegiate Press Best of Show award for 2001 and took second place in the Southern Literary Festival.
In addition to volunteering as an editorial assistant for Birmingham Poetry Review and PMS, the first Alabama journal devoted to women writing about women, she assists with the UAB Writers’ Series, which sponsors several poetry readings a year. She also assists with the UAB chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the English national honor society, and Vade Mecum, the English club. Most recently, she helped develop and became central administrator for Magic City Community Writers, a non-profit community organization that provides off-campus, non-credit, community-centered creative writing workshops to the public under the auspices of the Birmingham YMCA.
Glenda Jo Orel is a senior anthropology student in the top 10 percent of her class at UAB. Orel, who plans to graduate in December, is a fourth-generation coal miner’s daughter and will be the first in her family to graduate from college.
In 1979, a Ku Klux Klan demonstration in her hometown of Graysville, 15 miles northwest of Birmingham, spurred Orel to organize her own counter demonstration. She produced a civil rights slide show, “Unmasking the Ku Klux Klan,” which was endorsed by the National Education Association and included in its Race Curriculum. She has traveled throughout the country lecturing with the show at more than 20 major colleges and universities, including George Washington and Cal State Fullerton.
She has worked at television station KCET in Los Angeles on AIDS educational outreach. She has taught drama at Glen Iris Elementary, organizing talent shows and plays and working with youth in crisis. She has tutored at the Adult Learning Center and also at the World of Opportunity, where she is a member of the Advisory Board. She is a paralegal with Gespass & Johnson, a civil rights based law firm.
Jacqueline "Jacque" Meyer is the executive director of the Greater Birmingham Humane Society. She was the driving force behind bringing the First Strike initiative to Alabama. First Strike links all agencies and hospitals that deal with abuse — child, spouse, elder and animal — into a network so that authorities can track and identify families in danger. This initiative recognizes and raises awareness of the proven link between animal abuse and violence against humans.
Despite death threats from drug dealers and the proprietors of dog fighting rings, she has helped increase the number of arrests for animal cruelty in the Birmingham area, and recently she achieved one of her biggest goals by finding the funding for a shelter cruelty officer to work with local police agencies. She also took a leading role in revitalizing the fight for the Alabama Pet Protection Act, which makes it a felony to abuse a dog or cat in Alabama. To accomplish this she helped create a coalition of politicians, police officers, lawyers, veterinarians and members of the public, all dedicated to the cause.