Bill Celis is a veteran journalist who has worked at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and has contributed to The Boston Globe, Education Week, USA Today and other national general-interest publications and academic journals in the field of education, his specialization.
He is the author of Battle Rock: The Struggle Over A One-Room School in America’s Vanishing West (Public Affairs, New York, 2002). The book, which chronicles the influx of urban migration to the rural West and the resulting rise of the one-room school, was included on several year-end lists and nominated for the Mountain Plains Regional Book Award. He’s at work on a second book based in Texas and the Southwest that explores the intersection between the Latino Civil Rights movement and the immigrant rights campaign, around the issue of access to public education. The book is under contract with the State University of New York Press.
His work has also appeared in the American Prospect magazine, The Boston Sunday Globe, The New York Times Week in Review, Teacher magazine, Columbia University’s Teachers College Record and Voices in Urban Education, a quarterly produced by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.
He holds a courtesy appointment in the USC Rossier School of Education, and is also a member of several professional organizations, including the Education Writers Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Celis earned his master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and his undergraduate degree in journalism from Howard Payne College, a small liberal arts college in his native Texas.
At USC Annenberg, he has taught the American Media History seminar, Advanced Magazine Writing, and writing and reporting classes for both undergraduate and graduate students. Students in his education, youth and learning reporting class, produce Watt Way digital magazine and present their work across media platforms in English, Spanish and Korean. Visit the web site at http://wattway.uscannenberg.org/
JOUR 505 - American Media History Seminar (
PDF syllabus)