#MediaMonday – Hannah Hayes
Oh, how we love AZ Big Media! Not only does it publish some of our favorite magazines (including AZRE, Ranking Arizona, Experience AZ, Arizona Business, to name a few) and host some of our favorite events (like Arizona’s Most Admired Companies, People to Know, Healthcare Leadership Awards and Fifty Outstanding Women in Arizona Business), it is headed by some of our favorite people, like past Media Monday-ers Peter Madrid and Michael Gossie.
AZ Big Media recently welcomed a new addition to its editorial family: Hannah Hayes has been named associate editor of Scottsdale Living, a premiere print and online lifestyle magazine, another office favorite. (She also has her own website that will certainly be a part of my blog roll, www.chicheroine.com.)So it is only natural we asked her to join our #MediaMonday family as well!
If you’re new to our blog, our #MediaMonday series is designed to get to know a member of the media a little better in a way that can’t be done with a typical Google search.
So, take it away Hannah! What do you want to tell the blogosphere today?
I am an Arizona native, raised in the West Valley when it still was peppered with pretty orange groves with citrus actually sold in grocery stores. I remember lying on our roof as a kid watching fireworks that shot up by Peoria High School when there was no subdivision blocking it and I remember where Bell Road became a desert wasteland. I was born at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix; when I began the job here as associate editor for Scottsdale Living and Experience AZ, I told everyone that I think my life (almost) literally came full circle, as out my office window I can see the hospital in which I was born.
I received my bachelor’s degree in English from Arizona State University West, but it was my early years as a home-taught student when my mom drilled within me her obsession for grammar and wordage. To this day I absolutely devour an editing task or anything to do with actually putting a pen to paper to create shapes – or fingertips to a keyboard – whether it’s because I’m writing, doodling or just trying out a wonderfully inky new pen. I received a small poetry scholarship in high school and for the past few years I wrote for a few local publications and bided my time between school and an art store in Historic Downtown Glendale, where I learned a new love for art journaling, bookbinding, watercolors and my personal favorite, taking apart vintage jewelry to make new pieces.
I try to spend some of my time being creative in one way or another, and I hardly ever really do so. This is one of many reasons I am so excited to be here at AZ Big Media. Writing was my first creative love (I used to fold copy pages together, staple them and inside write and illustrate little stories – I still have them!) and now I get to do it as a job, every day, as a challenge, or as a not-so-challenging task, or for fun, or not for fun. It’s the good with the bad sentences and paragraphs that push a writer to become better. (Case in point: <– that one). Who would I want to be if I could? Quite a few contributors at GQ, who never fail to either entertain or inform me, or Joan Didion covering hippies in the 60’s, or Style.com editor-at-large Tim Blanks front row at New York Fashion Week readying to put a few blessed or snarky phrases online. I adore words and the power they have over anyone and everyone. I worship the way they can change everything and how small edits can change them. This is me in a nutshell. I hope to bring all this passion to AZ Big Media and run with it.
