2017 UC Berkeley Extension Honored Instructors

We celebrate the best of the best and thank them for their talent, effort and enthusiasm.
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Dean Diana Wu with 2017 Honored Instructors at celebration

We recently had the pleasure to join together to celebrate the must-deserved recipients of the 2018 Honored Instructor Awards. Diana Wu, the dean of Extension, hosted the event at the Women's Faculty Club on campus. Each recipient was introduced by the academic director who had nominated them for the prize. The instructors were then asked to share a few thoughts on what motivates them to teach and serve the local community.

It was an inspiring evening, and a reminder of the many people who make working at Extension such a pleasure and honor. We have profiled the instructors throughout the past months on Voices, and collect their stories here so that you can see the breadth of talent in our instructor pool.

Many thanks to our 2017 Honored Instructors! Below, find some information about them and see what classes they typically teach.

Daniel Coshnear, M.F.A., has taught fiction in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1997. His recent novella, Homesick Redux, received first prize from Fiction Fix. He is the author of two story collections: Occupy & Other Love Stories (Kelly's Cove Press 2012), and Jobs & Other Preoccupations (Helicon Nine, 2001), winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Award. He has received awards from the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Association, The Missouri Review's Editor's Prize, and a Christopher Isherwood Foundation Fellowship. He recently edited an anthology entitled 95% Naked: Fictions and Nonfictions (Wordrunner Press, 2010).

Laurie Ann Doyle, is the author of World Gone Missing (Regal House Publishing, 2017). Stories in this book have won the Alligator Juniper National Fiction Award, as well as nominations for Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize. Her stories and essays have also been published in The Los Angeles Review, Timber, Jabberwock Review, Under the Sun and elsewhere. Doyle co-founded Babylon Salon, San Francisco’s long-running literary reading series, and has been a writing instructor with UC Berkeley Extension for nine years. Find her online at www.laurieanndoyle.com.

Carl Limsico, B.A., Certified Java Programmer, is an independent web architecture consultant. He teaches Java, Python and Perl programming online. Limsico has more than 15 years of software development experience, ranging from mobile applications to enterprise-level systems.

Joanna Smith, M.P.H., CHA, LCSW, is the founder and CEO of Healthcare Liaison, a health care advocacy practice in Berkeley. Smith divides her time between assisting her clients in navigating through complex medical situations and teaching, both at UC Berkeley Extension and in her own credentialing program through Healthcare Liaison. She has 30 years of experience in the fields of health care advocacy, mental health and medical social work. Smith also founded the National Association of Healthcare Advocacy Consultants in 2009 and organized its first Annual Conference in 2009. She served as the first president of NAHAC and now chairs the membership committee for the association.

Stephen Wong, M.Arch., is an architect and staff project manager with Kaiser Permanente, overseeing the planning, design and construction of a variety of capital projects. With almost 30 years of experience, he has worked on all phases of building projects, specializing in project management, construction documentation and contract administration. Wong has taught and lectured throughout the West Coast and Asia, including the Academy of Art Masters Program and Autodesk. He has taught at UC Berkeley Extension since 2001.