Author and Journalist has accepted NABNA's invitation to lecture at the 30th Annual Training Conference on Thursday July 12th. Chepesiuk is a freelance journalist and writer based in Rock Hill and Surfside Beach, South Carolina. A native of Thunder Bay, Canada, Ron worked as a Fulbright Scholar to Bangladesh in 2003 and is currently a Visiting Professor of Journalism at Chittagong University in Bangladesh. He is also an adjunct journalism instructor in the Extension Division, Journalism Department, UCLA, where he teaches courses on investigative journalism, feature writing and news writing.

Ron holds a B.A. degree in history and political science from Minnesota State University Moorhead, a Master's degree in library science from Atlanta Clark University and a post graduate diploma in archival science from the National University of Ireland, University College Dublin. Prior to becoming a full-time freelance writer, he was a professor of library science at Winthrop University in Rock Hill.

Ron is the author of 22 books, including Sixties Radicals Then and Now; Candid Conversations with Those Who Shaped an Era, Hard Target: The US's War with International Drug Trafficking, 1982-1997, and The War on Drugs: An International Encyclopedia, which includes a forward by former Colombian President Andres Pastrana Arango. The Bullet or the Bribe: Taking Down Colombia's Cali Drug Cartel, an investigation of history's most powerful criminal organization, was published in October 2003. British publisher Milo Books published the paperback edition of the book in April 2005 as Drug Lords: The Rise and Fall of the Cali Cartel.   

Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK and the recently released While America Slept, describes the book as an "important addition to the literature of the great drug cartels." Ben Gilman, former member of Congress (1973-2000) and former chairman, of the House International Relations Committee, hailed the book is "a timely, pertinent lesson for our nation's ongoing war, not only against drugs but against the international terrorist network, many of whom derive their resources from drug trafficking."

Ron's 3,500 plus published articles have appeared in more than 400 magazines, newspapers, websites, newsletters and scholarly publications. They include USA Today, New York Times Syndicate, Black Enterprise, Writer's Digest, The National Review, The Columbian Journalism Review, Woman's World, Modern Maturity, The Rotarian, Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Writer's Digest, Defense and Diplomacy, Foreign Trade, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, New York Daily News, St Petersburg Times and the Charlotte Observer, among others. He has served a contributing editor and writer to more than 30 magazines and newspapers, including Asian Week, Rolls Royce Magazine, the Year in Computing, Irrigation and Green Industry, Crime Beat and Environmental Health Perspectives. His articles have covered every topic except gardening.

Ron has reported on events in nearly thirty-five countries, including Cuba, Northern Ireland, Colombia, Kenya, Colombia, Hong Kong, Nepal and Czechoslovakia. He has interviewed numerous celebrities, including Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat, John Kerry, Gerry Adams, Evander Holyfield, Andie McDowall, Noam Chomsky, Abbey Hoffman, Timothy Leary and three presidents of Colombia, among others. He currently writes a column titled 'Inside America" for The Daily Star, Bangladesh's largest English language daily newspaper, and serves as a Lecturer and Research Associate at the National Defense College in Dhaka, Bangladesh and as a member of the Advisory Board of the Bangladesh media think tank, The Forum for Development Journalism.

Ron is a former writing instructor in the Writer's Digest School and has taught journalism classes at Winthrop University, Coastal Carolina University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte. He has also taught workshops for Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists and forThe Daily Star, Holiday, The New Age and other newspapers in Bangladesh.

Ron has received several awards, including the OCLC-Bogle-Forrest Press Award in 1999 for "significant contribution to international librarianship," an award from South Carolina Commission on the Status of Women in 1989 for promoting status of women in South Carolina, a 2003 DEA Watch web site Honorary Drug Enforcement Administration Agent of the Year award for his book, The Bullet or the Bribe, and several writing awards for the Florida Freelance Writers Association.

He has also received grants from the Kaltenborn Foundation to study the media in Hong Kong and Colombia, from the Fund for Investigative Journalism to study working conditions of women garment workers in South Asia, and from the South Carolina Committee for the Humanities to produce a television series on "women leaders in South Carolina for ETV (Educational Television). He is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, the National Writer's Union, the International Narcotics Enforcement Officers Association and the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime.

Ron's wife, Magdalena, is a native of Colombia, South America.