Member Author Event: World War II Discussion

Moderator Natalie Jacobsen is a Director of Marketing & Communications at Airlink, a humanitarian NGO, and a former freelance journalist. After graduating from the University of Oregon Journalism School, she lived and worked in media and correspondence in Japan, and later in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she reported on the events surrounding the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally, and worked on a documentary about the police response; ultimately taking Governor McAuliffe to the Supreme Court over denied FOIA requests, and won, strengthening journalists' and First Amendment rights in Virginia. She leads a number of writing workshops throughout Northern Virginia and Washington for aspiring authors.

She is a debut author; her historical fiction, GHOST TRAIN, looks deeply at the effects of Westernization in Japan, and on women specifically, at the end of the 19th century, and is available anywhere books are sold.

Jody Beck grew up in Lincoln Nebraska, the oldest of five children born to Phyllis Kokjer Beck and Leo J. Beck Jr. Ty’s parents were occasional visitors to the Beck home, but both died when Beck was in college and before she knew about Ty’s story.

Beck was a reporter for The Washington Star, an assignment manager for WRC-TV (NBC-4), taught journalism at the University of Maryland-College Park, and  was the director of the Scripps Howard Foundation’s semester in Washington internship program.

She earned a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a master’s degree from the University of Maryland-College Park, both in journalism. She lives in Washington, DC.

Lucy Colback is a journalist, conference speaker and aspiring author. She has written financial commentary for the Financial Times’ prestigious Lex column as well as features for FT publications including the Weekend FT. She left the FT in 2017 to travel the world interviewing World War Two survivors and is currently compiling a book of their stories.

Prior to becoming a journalist she worked in finance, focusing on Asian equities in roles including equity research sales and as an analyst and investor for companies such as Schroders and Merrill Lynch.

She has had a long association with China and the Asian region. She studied Chinese at Cambridge University in the UK and a Masters in Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, focusing on politics and economics. For her work she travelled frequently to Taiwan, South Korea, China and South East Asia. She has lived and worked in London, New York, Singapore and Hong Kong, where she currently resides.

Noël-Marie Fletcher is a career journalist and award-winning author in Washington, D.C. She started her journalism career in California and moved to Hong Kong where she covered the High Court for the HongKong Standard newspaper. She became a foreign correspondent for The Journal of Commerce, America's oldest daily business paper, and travelled throughout Asia before being posted to Beijing as China Correspondent. She is a founding member of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China in the PRC and has written extensively for newspapers, magazines and wire services. In 2017, she wrote briefly in Berlin for The Times (London) before returning to the U.S. to cover business and government in D.C. She serves on a chapter president in the Santa Fe Trail Association and DC chapter regent in the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Fletcher is the author of several books—three have won National Federation of Press Women book awards. Her latest book is “Reporting the Nuremberg Trials: How Journalists Covered Live Nazi Trials & Executions”. The book has won two 2025 book awards (a national one & 1st Place chapter-level award) from the National Federation of Press Women. Her book tells how the international press corps lived in a castle while covering the first trial of top Nazi war criminals and subsequent executions of 10. She provides an insider's look based on her extensive research and insights gathered from Nuremberg, including at Faber Castle (where the journalists lived) and in the courtroom. This November marks the 80th anniversary of the start of this historic trial—which also underscores the importance of journalism in a free society.