Town and Gown: Strengthening Community Partnerships
Deborah Fallows is a writer, author, and linguist. She has written for many national publications, including The Atlantic, The NY Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, National Geographic, Slate, and others. She has written three books, most recently (with James Fallows) the national best-selling Our Towns: a 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America, based on more than a decade of reporting on towns across America. She is an executive producer of the HBO documentary Our Towns, and is the co-founder of the Our Towns Civic Foundation.
Fallows has an AB from Harvard and a PhD in theoretical linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. She has worked in academic and applied linguistics at Georgetown University. An earlier best-selling book is Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language, based on years living in China.
Previously Fallows was a senior research fellow at the Pew Research Center and also director of data architecture at Oxygen Media. She now writes and edits for the Our Towns Foundation website. Deborah Fallows and her husband live in Washington, DC. They have two married sons and six grandchildren.
James Fallows is a longtime author, editor, and broadcaster. He has reported from around the world for The Atlantic and other magazines, and has been a regular commentator on NPR, PBS, CBS Sunday Morning, and other programs. He and his wife Deborah have had multi-year assignments in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, and in Washington State, Texas, and California. Together, they wrote the national best-selling book Our Towns and the 2021 HBO movie of the same name.
Fallows’s 11 other books include National Defense, winner of the American Book Award for nonfiction, and Blind Into Baghdad, based on articles for which he won the National Magazine Award. He now writes regularly at his Breaking the News Substack(Link is external) site. During the Jimmy Carter administration, while in his 20s, Fallows was chief White House speechwriter. For several years, he was editor of US News.
Fallows studied American history at Harvard and earned a degree in economics at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a long-time instrument-rated pilot.
Patricia Melton is a strategic transformational practitioner who leads a visionary, comprehensive economic development intervention through scholarship, support and career launch (traditional jobs and entrepreneurship) programming whose mission is to promote college education and workforce pathway development for New Haven public school students. New Haven Promise supports 800+ active university scholars and more than 1,500 Promise alumni ‘To, Through, And Back’ from college to career and civic launch in the Elm city. Promise strengthens the economy of the city by working in an ecosystem tasked with preparing the next generation of leaders in the Greater New Haven region.
Patricia’s career is vast and diverse and includes a tenure as Chief Academic Officer of Indiana’s third-largest district, the county-wide Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporations, where she managed all academic instruction, including 44 principals responsible for 23,000 students. Also, she served as Assistant Dean of Instruction for Early College High Schools at Vincennes University and earlier in her career was the Vice President of High School & Administrative Director of the Community Teacher Institute at City on a Hill Charter School, Boston’s first charter high school.
An alumna of Middlesex School in Concord, Ma, and 1st Generation-to-College student, Patricia was one of the first girls to attend newly coeducational Middlesex on an A Better Chance Scholarship in the 1970s. As a gifted athlete and independent student who continued to excel at Yale University, Patricia earned her undergraduate degree in African American Studies (BA ’83) and subsequently received her master’s in education with a focus in Business from Arizona State University. Additionally, Patricia served in the Marine Corps Reserves while an undergraduate student.
Colin McEnroe is a radio host, newspaper columnist, magazine writer, author, lecturer, moderator, college instructor, playwright, and occasional singer. 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of his arrival in a newspaper city room to begin his career, only to discover that he knew a great deal more about Nathaniel Hawthorne than about zoning. He started as a radio host in 1992 and moved to CT Public in 2009. He is the author of three books. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Hartford Courant, many Hearst newspapers, Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, Forbes FYI, Mademoiselle, Mirabella, Backpacking, Bicycling, and McSweeney’s.
For five semesters, he taught a seminar on political media in the political science department at Yale. As an onstage interviewer and moderator, he has shared the stage with Stephen King, Salman Rushdie, Anthony Bourdain, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Fred Armisen, Tig Notaro, Marc Maron, Amy Tan, Bob Woodward, Tim Gunn, Alice Waters, Al Franken, Molly Ivins, Anita Hill and many others.
He is allergic to penicillin. He dislikes coffee mugs with black interiors. You can’t even see the coffee. There could be a kraken in there.
