“child_of” for “the_category” tag?

If you saw my other post, you’d already know that I’m an editor and I’m setting up the website for my school newspaper. We have about a hundred writers and we can’t give them all accounts, so my solution has simply been to give each writer a category. So my cats are organized like this:

Writers
> James King, ’07, Sports Editor
> Dan Phan, ’08, Writer
> Jake Jim, ’05, News Editor
etc.

Section
> Technology
> News
> World Issues
etc.

On my front page, below the post title of an article, I’d like to have the author of the article.

child_of would do this perfectly, but it’s only used with wp_list_cats, a template tag that lists all writers, including those that didn’t write the story.

Is there a way to list only the writers who wrote the specific story? Is there a better way to organize large amounts of writers, without giving each their own account?