Young alumni award for Bounds

Bounds receives Distinguished Young Alumni Award

School alumna Wendy Bounds has received the UNC General Alumni Association’s 2007 Distinguished Young Alumni Award.

Bounds, a Raleigh native, is a Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote a book about finding a home after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

“The remarkable accomplishments of many of Carolina’s younger alumni are truly inspiring,” said Douglas Dibbert, association president. “The GAA delights in presenting each year the Distinguished Young Alumni Awards to those who have made our alumni and our university so proud.”

Bounds graduated from the Hussman School of Journalism and Media in 1993. As a student, she was editor-in-chief of The Journalist, then a magazine of the school. She won first place in the national writing, photojournalism and broadcast news championships of the William Randolph Hearst Foundation Journalism Awards Program for college students.

Bounds joined The Wall Street Journal after graduation. She writes about the quirks and challenges of small business and entrepreneurship in the Journal’s “Enterprise” column. She also pens a column on home improvement called “Did It Myself” for the paper’s Saturday “Weekend Journal” section. Bounds has chronicled the rise and fall of companies in many industries, including fashion, travel, retail, marketing and media.

Bounds recently launched the Journal’s small-business blog. She is a financial correspondent for CNBC and contributes to ABC TV’s “Good Morning America.”

Her first-person essay “Amid the Ashes, Baby Carriages, Shoes, Family Photos,” which she wrote with fellow Journal reporter Kathryn Kranhold, won the 2002 Front Page Award for 9/11 commentary from the Newswoman’s Club of New York.

Bounds lived beside the World Trade Center, near the Journal, until the 9/11 attacks left her homeless. While looking for a place to live a safe distance from New York, she came across a deli with a small bar overlooking the Hudson River, in Garrison. N.Y.

She learned about efforts by the family who owned the place to keep it open after the father became too sick to work every day. The conversation inspired Bounds to help out at the bar; it also led to her 2005 book about finding home again in the midst of so much upheaval: “Little Chapel on the River: A Pub, a Town and the Search for What Matters Most” (HarperCollins, 2005).

Since 1989, the General Alumni Association’s Distinguished Young Alumni Awards have recognized alumni aged 40 or younger whose accomplishments have brought credit to the university.