Dusty Sang has published more than 150 essays examining the history, culture and ideas that have shaped the American experiment. In American Echoes - Volume I, he explores the people, events, institutions and cultural forces that continue to influence the United States and its place in the world.
DUSTY SANG
Dusty Sang is the President of Stay Thirsty Media, Inc., A News and Entertainment Company, and Co-Founder and Director of The Ryan Licht Sang Bipolar Foundation.
A graduate of The Latin School of Chicago (1966), Northwestern University, BS in Speech (Radio-TV-Film) (1970) and DePaul University College of Law, JD cum laude (1974), he was a Clerk Extern for U.S. District Court Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz (1973-1974) before entering the private practice of law. He is a member of the Florida Bar (active for the past 51 years) and of the Illinois Bar (retired).
With a special interest in international criminal law, he was a Member of the Delegation of the International Association of Penal Law (AIDP) to the United Nations Congress on Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders in Geneva, Switzerland (1975). He was the Chief Representative of the International Association of Penal Law (AIDP) to the United Nations, Fourth Session of the Committee on Crime Prevention and Control in New York (1976). He also received a Fellowship from the International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Sciences in Italy (1976).
In addition, he was a Project Coordinator for the Middle East Institute in the drafting of a United Nations Protocol for an Arab-Israeli Peace Conference, Washington, D.C. (1976).
Beginning in the early 1980s, he was Chairman and CEO of South Florida Public Telecommunication for nine years and was the Producer of the Emmy-nominated program, “The Future of America in Space.” (1988 Florida Emmy Awards)
After the passing of his son and only child, Ryan, at the age of 24 in 2004 from Bipolar Disorder, an illness that he battled valiantly for most of his life, Dusty and his wife, Joyce, formed The Ryan Licht Sang Bipolar Foundation (rlsbf.org) with a mission to foster awareness, understanding and research for early-onset Bipolar Disorder. The Foundation is on a “Quest for the Test” to find an empirical, biomarker test for this serious illness of the brain so that early detection and early intervention are possible. The Foundation is now in its 22nd year and works every day to change the course of this illness so that millions of children, adolescents and their families can see a brighter day.
In June 2006, Dusty founded Stay Thirsty Media, Inc. with some of Ryan’s friends and launched Stay Thirsty Magazine on September 1, 2006, as a purely online window into the world of artistic expression in keeping with Ryan’s mantra to “stay thirsty” for all things of the creative mind (staythirstymedia.com). Over the next two decades, the magazine featured extraordinarily talented musicians, singers, composers, writers, actors and dancers. From Grammy winners Tina Turner, Leonard Slatkin and Pinchas Zukerman to Academy Award winners and nominees Gary Sinise and Carol Bayer Sager to Tony winners Kelli O’Hara and Bebe Neuwirth to Rock n’ Roll Hall of Famers the Doobie Brothers and Lamont Dozier to Emmy winner David McCallum to Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists Paul Muldoon, Kay Redfield Jamison, Robert Olen Butler, Gerald Posner, Jericho Brown and Geraldine Brooks to Poets Laureate Billy Collins, Robert Pinsky and Tracy Smith to cultural icons Jerome Charyn and Henry Rollins, Stay Thirsty Magazine published over 2,600 interviews, columns and original works and was read in over 150 countries as it slipped beneath the cracked cement of society’s streets and discovered the pulse of contemporary expression.
In March 2009, Stay Thirsty Publishing was founded to publish books by exceptional writers. Four of its books became Amazon #1 Bestsellers, three became Amazon #1 New Releases and one of its Stay Thirsty Poets won the Pulitzer Prize.
Dusty, with his wife, has been the recipient of the Community Service Award from the Palm Beach Chamber of Commerce (1990), the People of Vision Award from the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute of the University of Miami (1992), the Hermes Humanitarian Award (1993), the Mogens Schou Award for Public Service from The International Society for Bipolar Disorders (2009), the Sallie Province Mink Community Education Award from Johns Hopkins (2017) and the Expanding Horizons Award from Florida Atlantic University and the Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute (2026).