David LowSusan Allison ’85 has just published a poetry collection, Down by the Riverside Ways (Antrim Books). Allison returned to Middletown a few years after graduating from Wesleyan and has lived here since. Most of the poems in this collection have been written in Middletown over the last 20 years. Allison comments: "I like the word concatenation, meaning: to link in a chain, to describe some of the poems. Many of the poems are concatenations of ideas based in experience. The book as a whole is a concatenation, and strives to make sense through random strings of devotion. I owe much…
Recent sculptures by Melissa Stern ’80 will be shown with work by four other artists at the Bachelier Cardonsky Gallery Open House in Kent, Conn. from May 23 through July 5. The opening is from 4 to 6 p.m. on May 23. Stern's work reflects both non-Western and outsider art influences. Her drawings, collages, and figurative sculptures are characterized by their richly drawn and deeply layered surfaces. She uses a wide range of materials from encaustic to clay, pastel to steel. “All of my pieces share a thematic thread,” Stern says. “Childlike and goofy my figures live in a dream…
Alex Kurtzman ’95 and Roberto Orci are the screenwriters for a new version of Star Trek, directed by J. J. Abrams, which premieres in the theaters May 8. The eagerly awaited movie has already received a large amount of advance publicity in the media, everywhere from Entertainment Weekly to the Wall Street Journal to sci-fi web sites, and advance word has been positive. The New York Times devoted a feature by Dave Itzkoff on April 26 on the upcoming film. The new version delves into the series’ mythology and takes the viewer to the origins of James Kirk and Spock…
Tracy Winn ’75 is the author of Mrs. Somebody Somebody (Southern Methodist University Press), a vibrant new collection of interwoven tales about the inhabitants of Lowell, Mass., a dying mill town. Her affecting and unsentimental stories, set from the 1940s to the present, cover a range of fascinating characters, including mill workers, a doctor, a hairdresser, a bookie, a restless wife, and several insightful children. In his review of the book in the Boston Globe, Steve Almond '88 praises Winn’s book as “a testament to the power of the short form.” He adds that her stories “carefully expose the universal…
Author Wells Tower ’96 recently garnered rave reviews across the country for his first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar Straus Giroux) which was published in March. The book received two fine reviews in the same week in The New York Times and was the cover review for The New York Times Sunday Book Review. For the Sunday Times, acclaimed writer Edmund White wrote: “Every one of the stories .., is polished and distinctive. Though he’s intrigued by the painful experiences of men much older than he is, Tower can write with equal power about young women and…
A recent March article by Nate Chinen in The New York Times focused on Firehouse 12, a New Haven state-of-the-art recording studio and home to a jazz record label of the same name. Firehouse 12 Records is co-owned by cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum ’98 and Nick Lloyd, who owns the recording studio. The Times article pointed out that the Firehouse 12 studio in a renovated 1905 firehouse in New Haven’s Ninth Square Neighborhood has also become a venue for performances by some of today’s most talented young avant-garde jazz artists. At the same time, Firehouse 12 records has already released…
Matt Tyrnauer ’91, special correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine, has produced and directed an engaging new documentary, Valentino: The Last Emperor, which was released nationwide in March. (The film opened in Manhattan on March 18 at the Film Forum.) Co-produced by Adam Leff ’90 with Carter Burden ’89 as executive producer, the film celebrates the colorful career of the renowned Italian fashion designer Valentino, covering the period between his 70th birthday and his final couture show. It tells the story of his extraordinary life, examines the fashion business today, and deals with the designer’s relationship with fame. At the center…
Michael Lobel ’90 is the author of James Rosenquist: Pop Art, Politics, and History in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2009), the first full-length scholarly volume devoted to the artist. Rosenquist's paintings, notable for their billboard-sized images of commercial subjects, are emblematic of 1960s Pop Art. The artist’s startling and provocative imagery deals with some of the major political and historical events of that turbulent decade, from the Kennedy assassination to the war in Vietnam. Lobel combines close visual analysis with extensive archival research, He provides social and historical contexts in which these paintings were produced and suggests new…
On March 12, Seth Lerer ’76 was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for his scholarly work Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press, 2008). On the website Critical Mass, NBCC board member Carlin Romano commented: “Lerer brought to his subject both the critical acuity and unlimited openness it deserved. He insisted on placing a complex literature within the history of childhood, a story both contested and blessedly clear. He took into account the cavalcade of publishing history, without permitting it to trample the imaginative ‘transformations’ wrought by the books.”…
Majora Carter ’88 was featured in February on HBO’s The Black List: Volume 2, which focuses on the achievements of a variety of African Americans. Carter discussed her work as an environmental activist. As founder and executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, she rallied an economically challenged community to create Hunt’s Point Riverside Park and began a program to train people in green jobs. Carter now heads the Majora Carter Group, a green-economic development consulting film. She also hosts the NPR radio series The Promised Land and is a host for the Sundance Channel’s The Green, the network’s weekly prime-time…
Film director and screenwriter Mike White ’92 (Chuck & Buck, School of Rock, Year of the Dog) has teamed up with his 60-year-old father Mel as a team on the popular Emmy-winning reality competition, The Amazing Race. Mel White is a prize-winning documentary producer, a gay-rights Christian activist, and a best-selling author who ghostwrote books for Billy Graham and Pat Robertson. White and his father have been interviewed for their appearance on the show in such publications as Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, and Mel White’s hometown newspaper, The Lynchburg News and Advance in Virginia. In various interviews, Mike White…
Thomas Kail ’99 who received a Tony Award nomination for his direction for the musical hit "In the Heights" (2008 Tony Award for best musical) on Broadway will stage the Encores! Summer Stars production of "The Wiz" this summer at City Center in New York City for a three-week run, June 12 to July 3. Kail will re-team with choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler who won a Tony for his work on "In the Heights." "The Wiz," a retelling of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz with an African-American cast, won seven Tony Awards, including best musical, in 1975. The show…