CCA Exceptional Women

Joan Merriam

Joan Merriam has been involved with CCA almost from the moment she began her teaching career at Sierra College in 1996. We say “almost” because in those years, Sierra's part-time faculty were prohibited from joining the college’s union.  In 1997, she helped form the Sierra College Part-time Working Group, a loose-knit coalition of part-time activists working to improve the salaries and working conditions of Sierra’s part-time faculty.  

When a subsequent effort to encourage the local to admit part-timers was rebuffed, Joan joined the move to create a separate part-time faculty association, and was elected to its Board. In the hope of enhancing communication within the college’s part-time contingent, she became the editor of the college’s first-ever part-time faculty newsletter; she also helped develop (and currently administers) what was at the time one of the few private email listservs for part-time community college faculty.  

After Sierra’s part- and full-time units unified in 1999, Joan was elected to the union's Executive Board where she served until 2008 in a variety of positions, including Communications Chair, Web Administrator, and Editor of the faculty newsletter.

Joan began her academic career at Sierra teaching business communications, but soon joined the Communication Studies Department where she currently teaches classes in public speaking, interpersonal and intercultural communication, and mass media. She has also taught a variety of adult- and community-education courses in subjects ranging from public speaking to business communication to writing. She was awarded Instructor of the Year in 2001, 2003, and 2006.  

She has served as CCA’s Web Administrator since 2008, a position she plans to relinquish in September of 2010 in order to devote more time to her “other” profession as a writer.  

 Her writing career began officially in 1996 with the publication of her nonfiction book, Little Girl Lost, which was reprinted three times and sold over 200,000 copies worldwide. She won a Society of Professional Journalists Award in 1995 for her article in Sacramento Magazine, and has written extensively for local, regional, and national publications.  

Her passions include gardening and Golden Retrievers; she currently lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains above Nevada City with her cat Zoey and her newly-adopted Golden, Casey.

Congratulations, Joan!

To view the archives of previous CCA Exceptional Women, click here.