About

Melanie Wilderman, Ed.D.

I am an associate professor of journalism at the Gaylord College at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK. In addition, I run the Oklahoma Scholastic Media conference and contest, an organization that has been serving scholastic media students, teachers and publications since 1916. My research mainly focuses on scholastic journalism education.

I think of myself as a media writing specialist. I started my professional journalism experience in community newspapers, specifically general assignments reporting and design work. After transitioning into higher education, I continued writing as a freelancer for a variety of magazines including Luxiere Oklahoma, Oklahoma Living, 405 Business and Norman Magazine.

I have also written young adult books, The Ghost Glimpser series, available on Amazon, and more recently I have gotten into screen writing. I was honored with the Randal Greenland Screenwriter of the Year at the 2019 Austin Revolution Film Festival and won best short screen play at the deadCENTER film festival with the piece The Uterus Chat. Meeting great people at deadCENTER led my husband and I to co-write a stage play, Alcoholidays, which was produced by NextStage and premiered in November 2013 in Oklahoma City. Since then, Alcoholidays has had two additional runs, and I have had another play, Fathiest, premiere in Oklahoma City.

Currently at OU, I teach a variety of classes including multimedia journalism, introduction to media writing, feature writing and media law. During my eight years at NWOSU, 2005-2013, I taught classes such as news reporting, news editing, feature writing, media law and publication design as well as advised the student newspaper, the Northwestern News.

I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in professional writing from University of Oklahoma and a doctorate in educational leadership and administration from Oklahoma State University.

2 thoughts on “About

  1. Melanie,
    We conversed via OSU email with the encouragement of Tami Moore. I wanted to reestablish contact with you again. I have started my dissertation work. I await permission from OU to begin recruiting participants. I will be contacting instructors for beginning journalism writing. I believe at OU that is Writing for the Media. I will also be contacting instructors from the first area specialty course such as reporting or persuasive writing.

    When I get to OU to do some observations, I’ll buy you lunch or something if you have time. By the way, it is so cool that you run OSM. I was a yearbook advisor for 8 years and we attended the fall workshop many years. We (Welch HS) even won the Sweepstakes one year. It was quite exciting.

    I hope to meet you sometime this fall on OU campus.

    Best,
    Sharlene Kenyon

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