An award-winning high school teacher and coach and a foreign news correspondent have been honored with Distinguished Young Alumni Awards by the General Alumni Association of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Stuart Alan Albright Jr. of Durham and Thanassis Cambanis of Beirut received the awards at a banquet Friday (Oct. 18) at the George Watts Hill Alumni Center. This is the 25th year the GAA has bestowed this award recognizing alumni age 40 or younger for bringing credit to the University through their achievements.
Albright inspires students in the classroom and on the football field, and Cambanis has written extensively about the conflicts and changes sweeping the Middle East
“The remarkable accomplishments of many of Carolina’s younger alumni such as Stuart and Thanassis are truly inspiring,” said GAA President Douglas Dibbert.
Albright, a native of Gastonia who graduated from UNC in 2001 with a degree in English, is an English teacher and a football coach at Jordan High School in Durham. In 2006, he was named the Durham Public Schools Teacher of the Year, and in 2007, he received a $25,000 Milken Educator Award, a national recognition dubbed the “Oscar of teaching” by Teacher magazine.
Albright, who also earned a master’s degree in education from Harvard, started a publishing company specializing in the works of his creative writing students. He also has published books of his own: two nonfiction — “Sidelines,” about high school football in North Carolina and based on his coaching experience, and “Blessed Returns,” focusing on a summer he spent in Camden, N.J., working with poor students that inspired him to be a teacher — and a novel, “Bull City,” the story of a teacher from Durham trying to prove his brother is innocent of murder.
Cambanis, a native of Chapel Hill who graduated from UNC in 1997 with a degree in history, is a former Daily Tar Heel editor who became a foreign correspondent, launching his career with The Associated Press in Greece and Indonesia. He later focused on the Middle East, writing for publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic and The Boston Globe. He also published a book, “A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel,” and is working on another about Egypt’s revolution. Cambanis has been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize and twice received The Boston Globe’s Publisher’s Excellence Award, for his coverage of the invasion of Iraq and the war in Lebanon.
Cambanis taught journalism at Princeton University, where he earned a master’s degree in public affairs and international relations. He also taught public affairs topics at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and The New School’s graduate program in international affairs.
Distinguished Young Alumni website: http://alumni.unc.edu/awards
Photo: http://alumni.unc.edu/images/news/DYA2013.jpg. For high-resolution individual images of Albright or Cambanis, contact News Services.
GAA contact: Doug Dibbert, president, (919) 962-7050, doug_dibbert@unc.edu
News Services contact: Susan Hudson, (919) 962-8415, susan_hudson@unc.edu