You can expect professional, idea-packed and sometimes provocative or humorous keynotes, breakout sessions and workshops at ACP’s 24th annual National College Newspaper Convention. It opens on Thursday, Feb. 28, with some intensive workshops, a stimulating keynote address and networking receptions, and continues on Friday and Saturday with a full program of more keynotes, scores of breakout sessions, displays and critiques. The convention ends at 11 a.m. on Sunday after another block of breakouts, a final keynote and the presentation of the Best of Show awards. All sessions will be led by media professionals, accomplished student media advisers and a select group of student journalists.

Keynote Speaker on Feb 29

Andrew Lam is a syndicated writer and an editor with New America Media, a short story writer, and a frequent radio commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. His essays have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country, including the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Sun-Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Lam has won multiple literary and journalism awards and was a John S. Knight Journalism fellow at Stanford University. Lam is author of the book of personal essays, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora which won the PEN Beyond the Margins Award in 2006.

Lam was born in Vietnam and left for the United States in 1975, settling in California. Lam studied biochemistry at UC Berkeley and then decided to take a creative writing course. For years he had blocked out the memory of Vietnam. In the United States, he had pretended Vietnam was a dream. He didn’t speak Vietnamese for the first 5 years he was here. In his late teens, Lam started wondering about the past. He wanted to explain his history to his peers.

He found the impetus to fuel his writing: to inform Americans about the history of the Vietnamese people. He was featured in a PBS documentary called “My Journey Home” which aired nationwide in 2004.

He’s been a guest speaker on CNN, CNN International, Talk of The Nation, The Jim Lehrer Hour, Star TV “Focus Asia,” History Channel, and many other television and radio shows.

His book of short stories, “Birds of Paradise” will be published in 2008. He is working on a novel.