‘Help Me Use My Gifts’: Retta Blaney ’78

This Alumni of Distinction profile was originally published in Universitas 2025-26, Notre Dame of Maryland University’s award-winning magazine.

“The caring faculty made me feel so seen, accepted, and cared about. That nurturing environment really shaped me.”

Retta Blaney ’78 chose Notre Dame because she wanted an education. By the time she graduated, she had received so much more. She had found her calling.

Now, an award-winning journalist, nonfiction author, and college educator, Blaney can trace the roots of her success back to her beloved English Department at Notre Dame, where the professors nurtured her talents and challenged her academically.

“The caring faculty made me feel so seen, accepted, and cared about,” she said. “That nurturing environment really shaped me. It was just so important to feel that, ‘Yes, I can learn, and yes, I have worth.’”

Two iconic former Notre Dame faculty –– Sister Maura Eichner and Sister Miriam Jude –– left an indelible mark on Blaney’s life. A celebrated poet and educator, Sister Eichner gave Blaney the confidence that she could become a great writer. Sister Jude’s French courses grew Blaney’s deep love for the language and encouraged her to continue studying it, even to this day.

Blaney treasured her enduring friendship with Sister Eichner, which inspired Blaney’s planned gift to fund the Sister Maura Eichner Scholarships.

“I would go visit her at her office when she was still teaching, and then I had the great privilege to visit her in her apartment. We would sit there in the living room, just the two of us, and talk,” she said. “We shared a lot. That meant a great deal to me.”

Five years after graduating from Notre Dame, Blaney had already won five journalism awards while working as an education reporter at the Carroll County Times, which confirmed she was on the right track. Since then, she earned another five journalism awards, most recently a first-place Award of Excellence prize from the Evangelical Press Association in 2023.

After spending several years as a journalist, she returned to school to earn a Master of Fine Arts and accepted a teaching fellowship at Brooklyn College. She later taught at the prestigious graduate journalism school at New York University. As an educator, she found herself modeling her professors at Notre Dame.

“The deepest way that my Notre Dame experience influenced my career is in the educator I became,” she said. “It was an intellectually stimulating approach, but it was also nurturing and person-centered. I always knew I was cared about wholly.”

Blaney got confirmation that she was meant to be an educator when she received praise from some unlikely sources.

“While teaching at NYU, I learned that one of the tenured professors, who I didn’t even know was aware of me, told a student about my teaching style saying, ‘She gives her students that Little Engine That Could confidence,’” she said. “More recently, a former student from my reporting class at Brooklyn College reached out to me, as she was preparing to join the faculty at a university in southwest Michigan. Thirty years after I taught her for just that one class, she wrote to me to say how she prayed that she could be for her students what I was for her. She often she says to herself, ‘What would Professor Blaney do?’”

Today, Blaney is living out her calling as a senior writer and editor for the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America and as a freelance theatre critic.

“For probably for the last decade, my prayer has been, ‘Help me use my gifts fully and faithfully to fulfill my life,'” she said. “And as I look back, I can say, ‘Yes, I have done that. I am still doing that.’”

Established in 1895, Notre Dame of Maryland University (NDMU) is a private, Catholic institution in Baltimore, Maryland, with the mission to educate leaders to transform the world. Notre Dame has been named one of the best “Regional Universities North” by U.S. News & World Report.