The Wesleyan Connection

Gregory Heller ’04

Gregory Heller ’04 is the author of Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press), the first biography of the controversial architect and urban planner.

A book launch will be held on Thursday, May 16 at the Center for Architecture in Philadelphia (1218 Arch Street) at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Go to http://hellergreg.ticketleap.com/edbacon/ for more information.

In the mid-20th century, Edmund Bacon worked on shaping urban America as many Americans left cities to pursue life in suburbia. As director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, Bacon forged new approaches to neighborhood development and elevated Philadelphia’s image to the level of great world cities. He oversaw the planning and implementation of dozens of redesigned urban space, including the restored colonial neighborhood of Society Hill, the new office development of Penn Center, and the transit-oriented shopping center of Market East.

Biography by Gregory Heller ’04

Heller traces the career of Bacon’s two-decade tenure as city planning director, which coincided with a transformational period in American planning history. He was a larger-than-life personality, and Heller argues his successes owed as much to his savvy negotiation of city politics and the pragmatic particulars of his vision.

In a recent interview with the Philadelphia Weekly Press, Heller revealed that he became interested in Bacon while completing an internship with the Philadelphia City Planning Commission while he was attending Wesleyan. Heller was able to meet with Bacon, who asked him to write his memoir. Heller took a year off from college to complete it and was then approached by a publisher to write a biography about Bacon. The author wrote his college thesis on Bacon and brought the architect to campus his senior year.

In his introduction, Heller writes: “We study history to understand the past but also to glean lessons for the present and the future. … Despite his shortcomings, Bacon’s ability to bridge the worlds of the visionary and active political actor was rare in 1949 and remains perhaps rarer today.”

Heller is a practitioner in the fields of economic development and urban planning. He is senior advisor at Econsult Solutions, Inc. in Philadelphia. His writing on city planning has appeared in Next American City, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Ruth Behar ’77 (Photo: Gabriel Frye-Behar)

Storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar ’77 is the author of Traveling Heavy: A Memoir Between Journeys (Duke University Press), in which she recounts her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. Behar shares moving stories about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the kind strangers she meets on her travels. The author refers to herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness and repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba. She asks the question why we leave home to find home.

Kirkus Reviews writes: “A heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban-American experience.”

Memoir by Ruth Behar ’77

Behar is the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is the author of many books, including An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba; The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart; and Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Behar also is a poet, a fiction writer, and a documentary filmmaker. She wrote, directed, and produced Adio Kerida (Goodbye Dear Love), a film that has been shown at film festivals around the world. She has received many prizes, including a MacArthur “Genius” Award.

Ruth Behar website

Virginia Pye ’82 (Photo by Terry Brown)

Virginia Pye ’82 has published her first novel, River of Dust (Unbridled Books), which begins on the windswept plains of northwestern China not long after the Boxer Rebellion. Mongol bandits kidnap the young son of an American missionary couple. As the Reverend sets out in search of the child, he quickly loses himself in the rugged, drought-stricken countryside populated by opium dens, nomadic warlords, and traveling circuses. Grace, his young wife, pregnant with their second child, takes to her sick bed in the mission compound, and has visions of her stolen child and lost husband. The foreign couple’s dedicated Chinese servants, Ahcho and Mai Lin, accompany and eventually lead them through dangerous territory to find one another again.

Novel by Virginia Pye ’82

This novel was inspired in part by journals of Pye’s grandfather, who was himself an early missionary in China. The author’s father was born and raised in China and became an eminent political scientist and sinologist.

Pye holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has taught writing at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. A three-term president of James River Writers, a literary nonprofit in Richmond, Virginia, she writes award-winning short stories that have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The North American Review, Tampa Review and The Baltimore Review. She currently lives in Richmond.

For more information see the Virginia Pye website.

Mary Roach ’81 (Photo by Chris Hardy)

Best-selling author Mary Roach 81 has just published her latest gift to readers, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (W. W. Norton), in which she takes a memorable tour inside and outside of the body. Her fascinating book on the process of eating brings readers upclose with the bodily equipment that turns food into the nutrients and sustenance that keeps us ticking.

On her quest for knowledge of the digestive tract, Roach meets with professors and technicians, murderers, mad scientists, Eskimos, exorcists, rabbis and other unique characters. She is fearless in asking taboo and embarrassing questions with relish and humor. Questions such as: Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you?

Book by Mary Roach ’81

In her rave review in The New York Times, Janet Maslin writes: “Never has Ms. Roach’s affinity for the comedic and bizarre been put to better use. … Gulp is a big leap forward for Ms. Roach because it doesn’t require her to do any padding or stunt work. Simply thinking about the body and interviewing the most oddball experts she can find are enough to rivet interest. And the circumstances she describes are sometimes hilarious, sometimes repellent, never dull. She’s at her cheeriest in describing rectal smuggling of items into prison, which is a more creative enterprise than you might imagine.”

Mary Roach talks to The New York Times Dining Journal

Roach interview with NPR

Roach is a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Nancy Rommelmann ’83 has released Transportation (Dymaxicon), a new book of short stories. A journalist as well as an author, Rommelmann writes with an unflinching documentarian gaze, focusing on the dreams, delusions, and occasionally criminal behaviors of subjects like serial killers, con men, and homeless teens.

In her new collection, Rommelmann tells stories that lean towards science fiction at points and towards magical realism at others. The opening story, “The White Coyote,” is a piece of black humor about a creature injected at birth with human DNA and its shaming at a Catholic grade school gymnasium. In “X-Girl,” a woman taunts a butcher and ignores his threats of punishment, while “Balzek” focuses on an artist determined to eat his own body for an exhibition.

Rommelmann is the author of the novel The Bad Mother, about Hollywood’s population of street kids, and the memoir The Queens of Montague Street, about growing up in Brooklyn Heights in the 1970s.  Her work has appeared in the LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Magazine, and Byliner.

Mark Saba ’81

Mark Saba ’81 recently released Painting A Disappearing Canvas (Grayson Books), a collection of poems spanning 30 years. Centering on his Polish and Italian roots in Pittsburgh, the poems focus on the subject of family life and universal themes of what it means to be alive.

Paolo Valesio, professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, writes in the book’s foreword that Saba is a “writer who meditates on the entanglement of his roots and who sounds as if he is tenderly worried that his children not be too bound up with this entanglement while at the same time he is concerned that they do not forget it.” Exploring these complications in such pieces as “Poem of Forgiveness” and “My Mother Straightens Her Babushka,” Saba creates a lyrical autobiography that, at the same time, connects his own experience to the greater American landscape.

Saba is also the author of the novel The Landscapes of Pater, about a boy’s search for a father figure and trip to his ancestors’ birthplace in Sardinia, and the novella Thaddeus Olsen, within the collection Desperate Remedies, which explores issues of identity, privilege, and the state of higher education in the United States. His narrative epic poem “Judith of the Lights” won the Mellon Poetry Award as part of the collection Three Women: Touching the Boundaries of Life. Besides writing poetry and fiction, Saba works as an illustrator and graphic designer at Yale University.

Poetry book by Mark Saba ’81

Dan Shannon ’01 and Annie Shannon

Betty Goes Vegan (Grand Central Publishing) by Annie and Dan Shannon ‘01 is one of the first comprehensive, everyday cookbooks for creating meals for today’s vegan family. This must-have guide features more than 500 recipes inspired by The Betty Crocker Cookbook, as well as hundreds of original, never-before-seen recipes that may also entice meat eaters. In preparation for the book, the authors attempted to cook all the Betty Crocker recipes vegan-style.

Cookbook by Annie and Dan Shannon ’01

The book offers insight into why Betty Crocker has been an icon in American cooking for so long—and why she still represents a certain style of the modern super-woman nearly 100 years after the nation first encountered her. Betty Goes Vegan introduces new classics for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert, including omelets, stews, casseroles, and brownies.

Dan and Annie Shannon live in Brooklyn, New York. Dan was previously the director of Youth Outreach & Campaigns for PETA and is now a senior strategist for the social movement strategy consulting company Purpose. He does the dishes. Annie has worked at the animal advocacy organization In Defense of Animals and as the fashion industry liaison for the Humane Society of the United States. She does most of the cooking.

Authors web site

Jodi Daynard ’79

Jodi Daynard ’79 recently published her first novel, The Midwife’s Revolt (Opossum Press), a work of historical fiction set during the founding days of America. The novel centers on midwife Lizzie Boylston from her grieving days of widowhood after Bunker Hill, to her deepening friendship with Abigail Adams, and finally to her dangerous work as a spy for the Cause. Daynard takes the reader into the real lives of colonial women patriots and explores human connections in a violent time.

Novel by Jodi Daynard ’79

According to Publishers Weekly, the book is “a charming, unexpected, and decidedly different take on the Revolutionary War.”

Daynard also is the author of The Place Within: Portraits of the American Landscape by 20 Contemporary Writers. Her essays have been nominated for several prizes and mentioned in Best American Essays. She has taught writing at Harvard University, M.I.T., and in the MFA program at Emerson College, and served for seven years as fiction editor at Boston Review.

Author website

Read an excerpt from The Midwife’s Revolt

Leonard Burman ’75

Respected tax scholar Leonard Burman ’75 is the co-writer (with Joel Slemrod) of Taxes in America: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press), a clear, concise explanation of how the U.S. tax system works, how it affects people and businesses, and how it might be improved. This highly accessible book, organized in a question-and-answer format, describes the intricacies of the modern tax system in an easy-to-grasp manner.

Book by Leonard Burman ’75

The book starts with the basic definitions of taxes and then examines more complicated and controversial issues. They address such questions as: How much more tax could the IRS collect with better enforcement? Why do corporations pay so little tax, even though they earn trillions of dollars every year? And what kind of tax system is most conducive to economic growth?

In his Forbes magazine review, Howard Gleckman says that the book “is no polemic for tax reform, but it is a powerful brief for such an effort. [The authors] are satisfied to describe how the law works, what taxes do to those who pay them and the economy at large, and how today’s revenue system was created. That design will make it a well-thumbed resource in the upcoming tax reform debate.”

Burman is Daniel Patrick Moynihan Professor of Public Affairs at Maxwell School of Syracuse University.

Adina Hoffman ’89

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University recently announced that Visiting Writer in English Adina Hoffman ’89 is one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Prizes. This new global writer’s award was created with a gift from the late Donald Windham and his partner, Sandy M. Campbell, and is now one of the largest literary prizes in the world.

Nine $150,000 prizes were awarded for outstanding achievement in fiction, nonfiction, and drama and recognize writers from all stages of their careers. The recipients range in ages from 33 to 87. Writers were considered from around the world. The prize jury in each category chose five finalists, from which the nine recipients were selected to receive awards.

Book by Adina Hoffman ’89 & Peter Cole

Hoffman’s prize citation reads: “In a land where even the most cautious nonfiction can draw howls of protest, Adina Hoffman combines fastidious listening, even-handed research, and prose so engaged that it makes the long-vanished visible again.”

Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. She is also the author, with Peter Cole, of  Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which was awarded the American Library Association’s Brody Medal for the best Jewish book of 2011. Hoffman has been a visiting professor at Middlebury, and NYU, as well as a Franke Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, she divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven. She is currently at work on Where the Great City Stands: A Jerusalem Triptych, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Carlo Rotella ’86 (Photo by Lee Pellegrini/B.C. Chronicle)

In his new nonfiction collection Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories  (University of Chicago Press), acclaimed journalist Carlo Rotella ’86 explores a variety of characters and settings, His writing has been praised for going beneath the surface of the story as he sympathetically dwells in the lives of the people and places he encounters.

The two dozen essays in this volume deal with subjects and obsessions that have characterized his previous writing: boxing, music, writers, and cities. “Playing in time” refers to how people make beauty and meaning while working within the constraints and limits forced on them by life.

Book by Carlo Rotella ’86

Besides his compelling writing on boxing, Rotella shares his engaging and insightful reportage on crime and science fiction writers, movie production, a megachurch, urban spaces, and more. Some of the essays appear in print for the first time.

Rotella is the author of Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt; October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature; and Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, the last also published by the University of Chicago Press. He writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, and the Boston Globe, and he is a commentator for WGBH FM in Boston.

A professor of English at Boston College, Rotella is director of the American Studies Program and director of the Lowell Humanities Series.

Jonathan Kalb ’81

Jonathan Kalb ’81 is the recipient of two national awards for his recent book, Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater, published by The University of Michigan Press. Kalb, professor of theater at Hunter College and doctoral faculty member at The City University of New York, won the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism and the Theatre Library Association’s George Freedley Memorial Award.

Great Lengths takes a close look at large-scale theater productions, often running more than five hours in length, which present special challenges to the artists and audiences. Recreating the experience of seeing the works, which include Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby, the book is aimed at general readers as well as theater specialists.

Book by Jonathan Kalb ’81

The Nathan Award is awarded annually by a jury of the English Department heads of Cornell, Princeton and Yale Universities, given for an outstanding work of criticism dealing with current or past dramatic productions. Kalb shares the 2011–12 award with Puppy: An Essay on Uncanny Life by Kenneth Gross. Kalb previously won the Nathan Award in 1990–91 for his first book, Beckett in Performance, as well as articles and reviews he published in The Village Voice.

The Freedley Award was established in 1968 to honor a book of exceptional scholarship that examines some aspect of live theatre or performance.