ABOUT US
The “Young Hemingway” Project is organized, funded and managed by Contemporary Learning Systems, Inc., a 501 (c) (3) company based in Michigan.
The project's first product for CLS will be a 60-minute public television documentary to be produced by Starbright Media Corporation (SMC) a Michigan company specializing in history-related television programming (www.StarbrightMC.com). SMC's main office and studio are located in Petoskey, Michigan, where it recently completed production of “Eisenhower’s Secret War” – a two-hour special for public television (www.EisenhowersSecretWar.com).
George A. Colburn, Ph.D. serves as the CLS Projects Director and is the writer-producer of the documentary for SMC. Educated as a historian, he has written and produced numerous history-based documentaries since 1981 for Discovery, Disney, public TV and the History Channel. He is well known in the media education field nationally, having produced at the University of California from 1974 - 1981 many national educational programs to accompany major documentary series airing on public television.
Dale Hull, the Project Director for the “Young Hemingway” documentary/education project, has a background in the fields of education, the performing arts, and non-profit administration. Over the past 30 years he has served on the Boards of Directors for several nonprofit organizations in Michigan, most recently for the Petoskey Library District.
He holds a BA in English, an MA in Humanities and another in Public Administration. He left the teaching field in 1984 after serving sixteen years as a high school English teacher. For the next eight years Dale worked as a freelance talent on stage, on the air, and in front of the camera, working in live theater, in many industrial films and acting in television and radio commercials.
Between 2000 and 2006, Hull served as the Executive Director of the Crooked Tree Arts Center in Petoskey, Michigan, tripling the organization’s membership and budget and helping it to become designated as an Anchor Organization in the State of Michigan. After retiring from Crooked Tree, Hull worked as the Executive Director of the Great Lakes Chamber Orchestra. Under Hull’s leadership the Orchestra grew to become a significant force in the cultural life of northern Michigan.
In 2009, Hull returned to the classroom at North Central Michigan College. In 2013, he was selected to serve as President/CEO of Pine Hollow Institute, an Elk Rapids-based retreat center concentrating on strategic planning for organizations involved in social services and the environment.
Professor Emeritus Ken Marek is the content consultant for writer-producer George Colburn. He is a native of Michigan and holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Central Michigan University. He taught composition, American Literature and a course titled "Michigan Writers and Literature" over a span of thirty -three years at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City. He retired in 2001. The Michigan Writers class enabled him to teach the Nick Adams stories and take his students to the areas in northern Michigan that inspired Ernest Hemingway to write most of these stories. Ken is a founding member of the Michigan Hemingway Society, and has served on its Board since its inception in 1990. Since then he has made numerous presentations on the young Hemingway at the society's annual conferences held each fall in Petoskey, Michigan.
