The UMass Dartmouth Student Media Collaborative (SMC) is an independent, student-centered media initiative. Through its partnerships with local media, such as the New Bedford Light, WCAI, and Public’s Radio, the SMC creates publication and internship opportunities for all students, offers leadership and mentorship opportunities for master’s in professional writing students, integrates publication and production opportunities with the professional writing MA and communication BA curricula.  In addition, the SMC builds technology skills at the graduate and undergraduate level and highlight production experiences already occurring in ENL classes. 

 

Prof. Caitlin O’Neil Amaral, Director

Caitlin O’Neil came to UMass Dartmouth in Fall 2009. She teaches journalism and creative writing. She is the advisor to the student newspaper, The Torch, and the campus literary magazine, Temper. In addition, she is the director of The Student Media Collaborative, an independent, student-centered media initiative that works with community partners such as the New Bedford Light, WCAI, and The Public’s Radio (TPR) to create publication, internship, and mentorship opportunities for students.

Prior to joining the UMassD faculty full-time, she taught as a senior lecturer at Suffolk University. Prior to teaching, Caitlin was an award-winning writer and producer for WGBH Interactive in Boston, working on well-known PBS programs such as American Experience, Masterpiece Theatre, Mystery, Antiques Roadshow, and This Old House.

Her freelance work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Standard Times, Publishers Weekly, Budget Travel, and Poets & Writers magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, Tampa Review, the Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, The Masters Review, and Calyx and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She won the Tampa Review’s Danahy Prize, the Ninth Letter Prize in Fiction, the Women Who Write International Short Prose Contest, and received a Massachusetts Cultural Council individual artist grant. She has had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, The Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and MassMOCA. She is a current BookEnds Fellow at Stony Brook University.

Dr. Megan Fletcher, board member

Dr. Megan Alyssa Fletcher is a feminist scholar of media, technology, and violence. She incorporates narrative-driven and intersectional approaches to craft interdisciplinary interventions for studying (and ultimately preventing) violence against women broadly, and intimate partner violence specifically.

She got her BA from Bridgewater State University in 2013, her MA from North Carolina State University in 2016, and her PhD from North Carolina State University in 2022.

Mackenzie Berlinguet,  SMC’s graduate assistant from Fall ’24-Spring ’25

Graduated from undergrad with a BA in Communications with a minor in Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Currently pursuing a Masters in the Professional Writing and Communications program.

 

Leah Freeman, SMC’s graduate assistant from Fall ’22-Spring ’24

Graduated from undergrad with a BA in Writing Studies at Millersville University in December 2021, and graduating from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth with a MA in Professional Writing and Communications Spring ’24.