Alumni Ink
Collision Course
Former Lutheran minister Henry Plageman is a master secret keeper and a man wracked by grief. He and his wife, Marilyn, tragically lost their young son, Jack, many years ago. But he now has another child—a daughter, eight-year-old Blue—with Lucy, the woman he fell in love with after his marriage collapsed. In The Half Wives, author Stacia Pelletier 98T 07PhD follows these interconnected characters on May 22, 1897, the anniversary of Jack's birth, to the city cemetery on the outskirts of San Francisco. The collision of lives and secrets that follows will leave no one unaltered.
Beauty from Loss
Addressing profound questions about how to make meaning out of suffering, Anya Krugovoy Silver 97PhD uses poetry to follow a mother, wife, and artist as illness and loss of loved ones disrupt the peaceful flow of life in her third collection of poems, From Nothing. Grounded in the traditions of meditative and contemplative poetry, From Nothing confronts disease and mortality with the healing possibilities of verse. Silver is author of I Watched You Disappear and The Ninety-Third Name of God and an associate professor of English at Mercer University.
Backstage Pass
Originally published in 1991, Party out of Bounds: The B-52's, R.E.M., and the Kids Who Rocked Athens, Georgia by Rodger Lyle Brown 98PhD is a cult classic that offers an insider's look at the underground rock music culture that sprang from a lazy Georgia college town. Brown uses half-remembered stories, local anecdotes, and lore to chronicle the 1970s and 1980s and the spawning of Athens bands such as the B-52s, Pylon, and R.E.M. This twenty-fifth-anniversary edition includes some new and rarely seen photographs by locals on the scene.
Soup's On
Before the 1820s, the vast majority of Americans ate only at home. As the nation began to urbanize and industrialize, home and work became increasingly divided, resulting in new forms of commercial dining. In Restaurant Republic: The Rise of Public Dining in Boston, author Kelly Erby 07G 10PhD sheds light on how commercial dining reflected and helped shape fragmentation along lines of race, class, and gender. Erby is assistant professor of history at Washburn University.
