Maine Sea Grant Communications Coordinator Awarded for Book
Contact: Catherine Schmitt (207) 581-1434; Aimee Dolloff, (207) 581-3777
Critics have called her work “enchanting,” “a rare treasure,” and “a superb effort to make natural science interesting, entertaining, and educational.”
They all appear to have gotten it right because University of Maine Sea Grant Communications Coordinator Catherine Schmitt recently received a silver award for her work “A Coastal Companion: A Gulf of Maine Almanac, from Cape Cod to Canada.”
Schmitt was selected as one of the winners from 241 submissions to this year’s annual Association for Communication Excellence (ACE) in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Life and Human Sciences Critique & Awards Program.
The program is designed to help ACE members achieve professional excellence through constructive criticism and to recognize those individuals who exhibit excellence in their work. Entries are evaluated on content, effectiveness, creativity and technical production.
Schmitt’s work is a 176-page journey spanning 12 months in the Gulf of Maine and its watershed. The book is illustrated by Maine artists Kimberleigh Martul-March and Margaret Campbell and published by Tilbury House.
Schmitt’s work serves as a chronicle of changes in the Gulf through the seasons and follows the arrival and departure of migrating shorebirds, schools of fish as they move in and out of the region, and the natural cycles of Maine’s bays, rivers, marshes, and coastal forests.
The Maine Sea Grant College Program, a state-federal partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and based at the University of Maine, has supported marine science education, research, and outreach since 1980.