Written By: Emilio Alonso-Mendoza
Welcome to the new, faster, mightier, digitized Volta Voices!
Our online format will only differ in platform and presentation from our retired print version, but we will continue to bring you high-quality reporting and writing from our award-winning team. This summer, we’ll publish Volta Voices on a regular basis, with profiles of AG Bell high school and college graduates, the latest research on infant speech development, our upcoming symposium (also virtual!), and more. Keep an eye out as well for the Volta Voices newsletter, which comes out semi-quarterly.
When Volta Voices was first introduced nearly 27 years ago, it was a unique outlet for the Listening and Spoken Language community. It shared our stories—your stories—and provided a platform for researchers to educate families and other professionals about their latest work and discoveries. Each issue was chock-filled with information that our readers took in enthusiastically, accompanied by detailed graphics and images that put names to faces, pictorial evidence to clinical studies. Volta Voices was a magazine that helped the AG Bell community grow and proliferate. From our offices at the Volta Bureau, it was always a magnificent experience to watch the smallest of ideas unfold into beautifully laid-out publications that arrived in our members’ mailboxes each quarter.
Our world today, however, operates in a much faster cycle, and communicates with audiences across multiple continents in ways that we once never thought possible. Networks span across the globe like intricate lace, and things we once considered barriers—like language, long-distance charges, postage, or even a pandemic—are no longer even obstacles anymore when it comes to communicating. We have so many instantaneous communication tools at our fingertips—video chats, translation apps, captioning, live streaming, social media. It was only a matter of time for our flagship magazine to catch up to the technological level of the devices that help us hear. If you’ve read a story here that intrigues you, please feel free to share it within your network as well.
Of course, becoming a publication that is timely means we need more stories than ever before. This new format gives you the chance to tell your story. We continue to welcome story ideas and writers, so please reach out to us if you’d like to contribute your writing to [email protected]. We look for stories that can help new parents of children with hearing loss and assist us in learning about technology, advocacy, health and education in the field of Listening and Spoken Language. I also encourage you to visit AG Bell’s website for resources and information. Together, we can take the journey to ensure that every person with hearing loss has the chance to listen, talk and live a life without limits.
Stay healthy and safe,
Emilio