Maria Henson (’82), editor of Wake Forest Magazine for 15 years, will retire in July after having led her team to more than 30 awards for general excellence and writing during her tenure.
The honors include Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year in 2019, the most prestigious international award for higher education magazines by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).
Maria’s time at her beloved alma mater represents “a crowning chapter” after 27 years of stellar newspaper work that produced two Pulitzer Prizes, says Mark Petersen, senior vice president of University Advancement.
But Maria’s legacy, say Petersen and others, lies not in awards, but in her devotion to building relationships, honoring alumni with masterful storytelling and conveying the Wake Forest story. She brought her personal touch to the mission.
“You can really just tell and feel all throughout the magazine — it’s got personality, voice, character in it,” Petersen says.
Universities often are tempted to pack their magazines with what they want alumni to know rather than focusing on readers’ perspectives, Petersen says. Maria’s goal was to move, surprise and engage alumni while maintaining the magazine’s long commitment to showcasing Wake Forester successes and Pro Humanitate lives.
Jeanne Whitman Bobbitt (’79, MBA ’87), chair of the Wake Forest Board of Trustees, says the magazine “was always wonderful people doing wonderful work, but she redefined it.”
Maria elevated the design, graphics, editorial content and the range and treatment of topics covered, says Bobbitt, who oversaw the magazine briefly when she worked in University communications.
Aside from the technical achievements, Maria “was faithful to that Wake Forest persona of serious character as well as its lighthearted and open, friendly demeanor. That’s a very complex calculus, and she just did it so beautifully,” Bobbitt says. “She was transformational.”
Retired Senior Vice President and General Counsel Reid Morgan (’75, JD ’79, P ’14, ’19), who spent 44 years in the administrations of four University presidents, has the long view of Wake Forest. He is secretary emeritus of the board of trustees after filling that role for 22 years.
He and Maria are friends, “and our conversations, as well as watching the magazine, tell me that she is a great student of Wake Forest’s history, the narrative of Wake Forest,” Morgan says. “She’s also analytical, and she gets into the deeper themes and identity of the school, … underlining things that illustrate the best of who we are.
“You feel the journalistic integrity that she applies to the job.”
Deacon humility
Let it be clear that Maria was uncomfortable with this story that Petersen assigned me to write, even as she wrote a well-deserved tribute to retiring Senior Editor Kerry M. King (’85).
Her career reflections shine a light on others.
“I remember graduating in 1982 and thinking about how one of my mentors, Bynum Shaw (’48, P ’75), who taught journalism, returned to our alma mater after his many adventures as a newspaperman. ‘Wouldn’t that be great if I could return one day, too?’ ” Maria recalls.
“It has been great indeed. My role overseeing Wake Forest Magazine and teaching journalism … has been exhilarating and filled with unforgettable conversations with students, alumni, faculty and staff.
“I leave proud of the magazine’s success, well aware that this publication has been the work of a team through the years, and I am grateful to each person who served with me. Thanks to our readers for sharing my love of Wake Forest and to Bynum and other mentors who have passed on but whose guidance I still cherish.”
Like so many amazing and humble alumni, including those she has written about, Maria focuses on tooting other people’s horns, not her own.
But toot about her, we shall.
She almost never mentions her Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her investigative editorial series on domestic violence that led Kentucky to enact every law proposed in the editorials. Neither does she tout her role as editor of a series of editorials by Tom Philp of The Sacramento Bee that won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize. The series focused on reclaiming a flooded valley in California’s Yosemite National Park.
While teaching journalism on top of her role as editor, she created the journalism program’s first News Literacy course in 2011 to help students understand the First Amendment and, with prescient insight, how to assess media in today’s information jungle.
She quietly mentored many students, including Amber Burton (’15), of Charlotte, who took Maria’s class and was a magazine intern (as was Deputy Editor Katherine Laws Waters ’20). Burton is a senior research analyst at i4cp, which focuses on best practices for human resources support. She previously worked for Fortune and The Wall Street Journal.
Maria boosted Burton’s confidence to pursue her childhood goal of a journalism career. “She took me seriously before I took myself seriously,” Burton says.
Burton says her most inspirational moment came when Maria invited her in 2016 to Harvard for a celebration of 100 years of the Pulitzer Prize. Maria, a prestigious Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1993-’94, gave a speech about her domestic violence series.
“It was the most inspiring thing (to hear) someone who was so humble, … to see where she was and to know I could do that one day,” says Burton, a 2022 Pulitzer finalist with a team at The Wall Street Journal.
Maria has an unfailing nose for a good story. She befriended Wubetu Shimelash (’20), who grew up in Ethiopia as a shepherd boy and made his way to Wake Forest. To tell his story in the magazine, Maria trekked, by mule at one point, with him to his remote mountain village to document his tale of determination, a loving family and the kindness of a stranger. Her writing won a top CASE award. Shimelash is thriving as an award-winning filmmaker and social entrepreneur.
King, who retired from the magazine in June, says Maria not only emphasizes relationships but has mastered the art of storytelling. “One of us would suggest a story on someone, and she would say, ‘Let me think about that.’ … She would just find the little nugget that elevated the story.”
Among other firsts, Maria began a monthly email newsletter to all alumni, with an evocative essay. (She was, after all, inducted into the Wake Forest Writers Hall of Fame in 2016.) She also initiated the magazine’s social media channels and upgraded its online presence with magazine.wfu.edu.
A Wake Forester’s journey
Maria left her home in Louisville, Kentucky, to study at Wake Forest and graduated with lifelong friends and Old Gold and Black in her veins. She embarked on a newspaper career across the country — a statehouse reporter covering Bill Clinton as Arkansas governor, a Washington correspondent, an editor overseeing investigations and an editorial writer, columnist and editor on opinion pages in Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas and California.
As she is a traveler who has visited all 50 states and 60 countries, it seems fitting that a safari vacation in 2007 in Africa indirectly led Maria back to Wake Forest. She fell headlong in love with Botswana and took a sabbatical in 2008 from The Sacramento Bee to volunteer at the University of Botswana and at safari lodges in the Okavango Delta, where she also mentored AIDS orphans and at-risk children. In the bush, she savored every minute — sometimes dangerous, always wild, always beautiful.
An excerpt from notes by Maria made during her first visit to Botswana in July 2007 and published in her blog in 2008
“I know that stillness speaks. I know that the sky can sing. I know that unity with the other is possible beyond words and recognizable by only the slightest thread in ordinary space and time. … I know that dominion over nature can be only a temporary exercise. The cycle will turn, round and inside out. What is nature if not ourselves?”
Soon after that, she realized she was ready to pursue that long-imagined return to Wake Forest. She arrived in June 2010 as associate vice president and editor-at-large overseeing the magazine. The job was more intimidating, she recalls, than the poisonous black mambas she had, literally, sidestepped in Botswana.
She and Petersen collaborated on a redesign and reimagining of the magazine in February 2011. The thing that immediately clicked with him and Maria, Petersen says, was how the magazine should feel when it arrives three times a year.
“It needed to feel like, ‘Oh, my goodness, I just received such a lovely gift from Wake Forest,’” Petersen says. “You sit with it, can’t wait to open it up, pour a cup of coffee and just enjoy. That was always our gut check.”
In a consultant’s survey of 100 alumni a few years later, respondents, unprompted, cited the magazine as their main source of University information and universally praised it.
Maria is retiring in Winston-Salem, where her parents and her sister and brother-in-law live. She will tend her front yard, known to neighborhood children as the Fairy College, where they often find treats left in the magical garden.
Friends of Maria, take heart that she, like so many alumni, will never really leave the Wake Forest community.
Carol L. Hanner, Maria’s friend for three decades, retired in 2024 after six years as the magazine’s managing editor, following a long newspaper career. She and her husband live in Portugal. Maria and Carol have traveled the world together, including that first trip to Botswana, with more adventures ahead.
