The Board of Trustees of the Adirondack Museum has selected Elizabeth Folwell as the recipient of the 2007 Harold K. Hochschild Award.The award is dedicated to the memory of the museum's founder, whose passion for the Adirondacks, its people and environment inspired the creation of the Adirondack Museum.Folwell served as the first director of education at the Adirondack Museum and was the director of the Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts for many years. Since 1989, she has been the editor of Adirondack Life, where she is currently creative director.The Adirondack Museum will formally present Folwell with the Harold K. Hochschild Award on Aug. 9.

Elizabeth ("Betsy") Folwell is creative director at Adirondack Life, though her writing career there began in 1989 as assistant editor. Scores of articles on local history, outdoor recreation, gardening, regional food, plus profiles and personal essays have been published in the intervening time. She has won half a dozen awards for writing from the International Regional Magazine Association, most recently the silver for columns published in 2005. Her work has appeared in Gray's Sporting Journal, the Helen Keller Foundation anthology, Rooted in Rock (Adirondack Museum/Paul Smith's College) and numerous travel publications. She is the author of two travel guides to the Adirondacks, including The Adirondack Book (Countryman Press, five editions). She is working on a memoir about losing her sight.

She has taught at Ray Brook Federal Correction Institution, in a program sponsored by the Adirondack Center for Writing and the Department of Justice. With Bibi Wein, she led a workshop in the process of making a real experience into a short story for the Adirondack Center for Writing. She lives in Blue Mountain Lake.

Betsy presented with Bibi Wein a workshop entitled "Nonfiction to Fiction." This workshop guided participants through the process with a series of writing exercises that took them from a real-life event or experience to a draft of a complete piece of fiction. Participants had the opportunity to read their work aloud at each stage. Discussion included creating characters, engaging the reader, questions to ask yourself when deciding what to include/what to omit, and the importance of story sequence in building suspense.