Year after year, the Spirit leads hardworking volunteers towards our mission with the dedication to service that makes our daily operations possible. 2016 is no exception. We’re excited to introduce to you two of the four outstanding people whom our tens of thousands of listeners will come to know over the coming year.

First, meet volunteer Karen Trop, pictured above. Karen hails from Macungie, Pennsylvania, and is a 2016 graduate of Vermont’s Bennington College, where she majored in art history and also deepened her interests in history, literature, and anthropology. Karen came to KNOM in June and will spend the next year in Nome as one of our two producers, working in the department led by program director Laura Collins. Karen deejays in the afternoons Tuesday through Friday and also hosts throughout the day on Saturdays. When she’s not on the air, she works on both short- and long-form specialty programming. She writes and produces many of the original radio “spots” — on a variety of inspirational or educational subjects — that KNOM airs throughout each broadcast day in place of commercials (since our station is non-profit). She also will soon be creating new episodes of our in-house monthly series Dearest Alaska, which presents “audio postcards”: the sounds of distinctive moments in our unique corner of the world, a way of understanding rural Alaska through sound.

Working alongside Karen in the production department is fellow volunteer Lauren Frost, pictured above. Lauren grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. Like Karen, her academic focus in college was a mixture of the creative and the historical: at New Jersey’s Princeton University, where she graduated in spring 2016, she majored in art and archaeology with a minor in creative writing. It was at Princeton, Lauren says, that she got “hooked on audio journalism” through her college coursework, once she “realized how powerful of a medium the human voice is.” KNOM has given her a practical start in radio, and like Karen, she’s already excelling both on the air and behind the scenes. Lauren hosts our weekday morning show, waking up before most of rural Alaska each Monday through Friday. When she’s not deejaying, she’s creating new radio spots and working on our monthly storytelling series, Story49.

Both Lauren and Karen are eager to learn more about the region — rural, western Alaska — that KNOM serves. Thanks to your support, we know they’ll continue and expand the heritage of kind service that your generosity has made possible since 1971.