Lois Leveen

My job is to make sure people across our city, nation, and world are aware of and benefit from the insights, creativity, and awesome contributions of Lewis & Clark’s faculty, students, alumni, and staff. As our public relations lead, I engage national, regional, and local media to cover a wide variety of L&C-related news stories. I also coach faculty and administrators on writing opinion pieces, giving interviews to journalists, delivering public testimony, and other strategies for sharing their expertise with the public. My external relations responsibilities include government relations, as well as working to develop and deepen Lewis & Clark’s community partnerships.

I bring broad experience to this role at Lewis & Clark. As a former faculty member at UCLA and Reed College, I still pursue my own scholarly research, which I share in academic publications and conferences. I also share my scholarly expertise through programs and publications for general audiences, such as The New York Times and The Atlantic. I have deep professional experience in strategic communications, including work in education philanthropy and with K-12 schools, districts, and educational service districts. During the more than two decades I’ve lived in Portland, I have continuously been involved in civic engagement and in community volunteering and advocacy work. I’m also a published novelist and poet, now working on a biography of a nineteenth-century African American activist.

My college-age self would be surprised to discover that I’m now a daily bicycle commuter who plays ukulele, sings in a harmony-by-ear choir, and loves to cook vegetables from locally grown, organic farm shares. But that same self would not at all be surprised by how many library books I have checked out, stacked all over the house waiting to be read.