Arkansas achievers
Tiffany Bilon and Amber Yates of the Little Rock Water Reclamation Authority have earned recognition from the Universal Public Procurement Certification Council. Bilon is one of two people in Arkansas in the past three years to obtain her certified professional public buyer credential, and Yates is one of two people in the state in the past four years to obtain the certified public procurement officer credential. With these credentials, Yates is now one of only 18 certified public procurement officers in Arkansas, and Bilon is one of 43 certified professional public buyers in the state.
Kathleen O’Malley, a Little Rock resident, 2017 graduate of Mount St. Mary Academy and a junior at Southern Methodist University in Dallas majoring in English and Education, has received the Margaret Terry Crooks Award for Most Outstanding Student in Creative Writing.
Brison Reding, a student at Cedarville High School, was inducted into the 100 High School Students America Needs to Know About. He was chosen out of thousands of students. The summer before his senior year, he completed a horse-shoeing school. Horse shoeing is a high demand skill in his rural community. He is currently operating his own horse-shoeing business called BFR Horseshoeing. Along with his business, he uses skills gained from his agriculture classes to weld used, rustic horse shoes to form artistic designs such as Christmas trees and horse figures. All of that work is being done while he finishes his senior year of high school. He is also involved in activities at school such as football, band and Future Farmers of America.
Jada Henry, a Film & Screen Studies major at Pace University and a Little Rock Central High School alumna, has been writing a novel called The Principles of Good
Taste and Ornament. The book is a thriller about societal prescriptions assigned to the average woman. She wrote her novel because she wanted to explore how society enables misogyny and how people contribute to it. She is working with her publisher (New Degree Press) to develop a pre-launch effort to help spread the word about her book, which is scheduled to publish at the end of July. Henry also won an exclusive spot in her university’s Mellon Grant Screenwriting Fellowship. She is one of eight students in the student body of Pace University at New York City who has received that opportunity to help advance her writing skills to a more professional level. The Fellows Program offers pre-professional experiences to complement classroom learning as a pathway to writing careers, through a range of mentoring, workshops, an internship and networking opportunities.