Nancy Wright Beasley’s journalistic career spans 29 years, including seven years as a state correspondent for The Richmond News Leader. A recipient of a master’s degree from Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Mass Communications, Beasley now teaches there.
     Beasley has been a personal columnist and a contributing editor for Richmond magazine since 1998. She has written national award-winning columns and articles for that magazine, as well as many other publications.
     In 1998, Beasley wrote her first article about the newly established Virginia Holocaust Museum. She was so moved by the stories re-created in the Richmond museum that she began researching the experiences of the Israel “Izzy” Ipson family and members of four other Jewish families who lived in Lithuania during World War II. Her research helped document how 13 Jews survived the Holocaust by living in a 9’x12’x 4’ underground hole, some of them for months, their lives sustained by a poor Catholic farm family.
     Brunswick Publishing released Beasley’s first book, Izzy’s Fire: Finding Humanity in the Holocaust, which retells the story of the five families, in January 2005. The book, which meets several of Virginia Standards of Learning, is being taught in eighth grade language arts classes in several Chesterfield County middle schools, as well as a variety of other public schools and universities. The author is available for presentations here.
     One of Beasley’s feature stories about the Virginia Holocaust Museum, which appeared in Rural Living magazine in 1998, was chosen by the National Association of Rural Cooperatives as the first place national feature story among a readership of approximately six million.
     Along with doing extensive interviews of the Ipp (now Ipson) family, Beasley helped research and document the reunion of that family with Stanislavas Krivicius, who as a teenager, helped his parents shelter the Ipps (and 10 other Jews) in Lithuania during the Holocaust. This information was used to declare Krivicius and his parents Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed by Righteous Among the Nations, Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem. The honor is reserved for non-Jews, like Oskar Schlinder, of Schlinder’s List fame, who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

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     Judges in the City and Regional Magazine Association’s (CRMA) national competition, which encompasses more than 85 magazines, gave Beasley’s personal column (“Reflections” – Richmond magazine) a silver excellence award in 1999 and in 2001. Her work for a 20-page special section on domestic violence and sexual assault in the City of Richmond (which published in Richmond magazine) won a bronze excellence award in civic journalism from the CRMA. The special section also garnered a best in show award in specialty writing and a first place in investigative reporting in Virginia Press Association competition, as well as an award of excellence in the Best of Virginia competition sponsored by the International Association of Business Communicators.

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The Virginia Press Women named Nancy Wright Beasley as their Communicator of Achievement in 2005. The Richmond YWCA  chose Beasley as one of Ten Outstanding Women in Central Virginia in 2006.