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Dennis Drayna, Ph.D., has served on the Stuttering Foundation Board of Directors since 2006. He is senior investigator at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health.

His current research focuses on using genetic methods to identify the underlying causes of stuttering.

February marked 50 years since John Glenn blasted off to orbit the Earth. Glenn, one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, is an American hero. But he has his own hero — his wife, Annie.

Author and CNN contributor Bob Greene recently wrote on CNN.com about Annie’s struggles with stuttering. “Her stuttering was so severe that it was categorized as an 85% disability. Eighty-five percent of the time she could not manage to make words come out,” Greene explained.

Lead singer for the rock band Hello Kelly, Francois “Francy” Goudreault, Jr., was also honored by the Stuttering Foundation. In Hello Kelly’s song Communication Breakdown, Francy and his bandmates have set to music the struggles 65 million people around the world live each day. Francy’s message and achievement amplify hope for a new generation of people who stutter. Hello Kelly is a feisty alt-rock band from Orangeville, ON.

Sept. 2011 — St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, was the perfect setting for numerous outstanding presentations by experts in the field.

The Stuttering Foundation provided continuing education credits for the conference, which was sponsored by the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children, endorsed by De Montfort University, Leicester, and organized by Elsevier.

A Limerick About the Western Workshop
By Ann Douvier

Out west went twenty SLPs
To learn to treat dysfluencies.
Drawn from four nations
By the Stuttering Foundation
To make more effective, our therapies.

We’ve all worked with children who stutter
Who’ve been told, “Slow down and don’t mutter!”
By listening, reflecting,
Exploring, detecting
We’ll help them succeed with the speech they utter.

By Diane Parris

Jane Fraser, president of the Stuttering Foundation, represented the stuttering community May 9 at the prestigious Monte Cristo Awards dinner honoring legendary actor James Earl Jones.

This is the second in a series of articles featuring Stuttering Foundation board members. This article and photo are used with permission from The Memphis Daily News.

My name is Glenn Weybright. I am a speech-language pathologist in Portland, Oregon, and a person who stutters. In late April, 2011, I spent 8 days with a medical team helping treat Haitian children and adults in a primary care medical clinic in the village of Gramothe, Haiti, about 15 miles south of Port Au Prince.