David LowCharles Newell ’81 was recently awarded the prestigious Zelda Fichandler Award, which recognizes an outstanding director who is transforming the regional arts landscape through singular creativity and artistry in theater. He received the prize, an unrestricted grant of $5,000, from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF). Over the years, Newell has become one of the nation’s foremost theater directors. He is currently in his 19th year as artistic director of the Court Theatre, the renowned professional theater in residence at University of Chicago, where he had directed more than 40 productions. Newell comments: “To receive The Zelda Fichandler Award…
Mike Cardozo ’08 has produced a new CD titled Something Better, performed by the band Show of Cards (showofcards.com), of which he is a member. The band was originally formed as a trio of Cardozo siblings: singer-songwriter Karen (of Chattering Magpies), bassist Joe (of Cold Duck Complex) and lead guitarist Mike. With drummer Makaya McCraven and engineer Justin Pizzoferrato, they released their debut Leap Year in 2009. With Something Better, Mike puts on his production hat to showcase his sister Karen's thoughtful songwriting in the textures, rhythms, and arrangements of musical languages from jazz to West African to classical. Karen and Mike are…
Marc Eisner, the Henry Merritt Wriston Chair in Public Policy, professor of government, professor of environmental studies, is the author of The American Political Economy: Institutional Evolution of Market and State, published by Routledge in 2014. Policy debates are often grounded within the conceptual confines of a state-market dichotomy, as though the two existed in complete isolation. In this innovative text, Eisner portrays the state and the market as inextricably linked, exploring the variety of institutions subsumed by the market and the role that the state plays in creating the institutional foundations of economic activity. Through a historical approach, Eisner situates the study of…
Tony Connor, professor of English, emeritus, is the author of The Empty Air, published by Anvil Press Poetry in 2013. Connor’s 10th collection is framed by military encounters. In the first poem a young man grapples with a malfunctioning machine-gun, while the author grapples with the poem he is making from this event, memory or fantasy. In the surrealistic sequence that ends the book, a strange army invades a country collapsing into societal and semantic dissolution. Connor’s abiding preoccupations continue into his eighties: his own life and the lives around him, passing time and its traps, poetry and its transfiguration…
Kate Cooper ’82 has written a new history of the early Christian movement, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women (Overlook Press), in which she provides a vibrant narrative of the triumphs and hardships of the first mothers of the infant church. As far as recorded history is concerned, women in the ancient world lived almost invisibly in a man's world. Piecing together their story from the few contemporary accounts that have survived required painstaking research, and Cooper offers a fresh perspective on the triumphs and hardships encountered by these early women. The book tells the intriguing…
Stuart Frank ’70, has been awarded the Historic New England Book Prize for 2013, for Ingenious Contrivances, Curiously Carved: Scrimshaw in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, published in Boston by David R. Godine. The award was formally presented on Nov. 3 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The book is also the recipient of the Boston Bookmakers Prize for the year’s best work in the pictorial category. Frank’s book brings his expert’s eye to the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s intriguing collection. By the middle of the 19th century, the New England port of New Bedford was among the five richest…
B. J. Buckley ’76 has written a new collection of poems, Spaces Both Infinite and Eternal (Limberlost Press) which considers the natural world, quiet, unspoken events—the accidental death of an owl, a porcupine gorging on apples, unobserved fragrant meadows, the roar of wind through cottonwoods. The presence of man is barely acknowledged in the rugged western landscapes of these poems. Buckley’s voice is a quiet guide through rural, mountainous territory. Her book is printed letterpress, using lead type on a old hand-fed platen press. A native of Wyoming, Buckley lives on a ranch near Power, Montana. She has worked in…
Katey Rich ’06 has a new position as digital Hollywood editor at Vanity Fair, where she is overseeing The Hollywood Blog. Before Vanity Fair, Rich worked at the Cinema Blend website for six years, and her last job there was editor-in-chief. She was previously an editorial assistant at Film Journal International. As Wesleyan she major in film studies and English. For those who have read Rich's writing at Cinema Blend, they already know she has been a savvy chronicler of the film scene and an entertaining film critic for years. At vanityfair.com, Wesleyan alumni can currently enjoy her thoughts on…
Photographer and sculptor Anne Arden McDonald ’88 has self portraits included in a group show, The Mind’s Eye: Sight and Insight, at the Hewitt Gallery of Art, Marymount Manhattan College (221 East 71st Street), in New York City. The show runs through December 5. The artists in this exhibition have a special relationship to their creative process both through the neurological (perception/sight) and the psychological (interpretation/insight). Information on exhibition Her work also appears in another group show, Mad Hatters to Pixel Pushers, at the Projective Eye Gallery of the UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture, UNC Charlotte City Center,…
In her new poetry collection Grains of the Voice (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press), Christina Pugh ’88 reveals a fascination with sound in all its manifestations, including the human voice, musical instruments, and the sounds produced by the natural and man-made worlds. All of these serve as both the framework of poems and the occa¬sion for their changes of direction, of tone, of point of reference. The poems contain echoes—and sometimes the words themselves—of other poets, but just as often of popular and obscure songs, of the noise of pop culture, and of philosophers’ writings. Beneath the surface of her work,…
Best-selling author Sam Wasson ’03 has published Fosse (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), an authoritative and fascinating biography of the renowned dancer, choreographer, screenwriter, and director Bob Fosse. The only person ever to win Oscar, Emmy, and Tony awards in the same year, Fosse was a masterful artist in every entertainment medium he touched, and forever marked Broadway and Hollywood with his iconic style that would influence generations of performing artists. Wasson reveals the man behind the swaggering sex appeal by exploring Fosse’s reinventions of himself over a career that would result in his work on The Pajama Game, Pippin, Sweet…
In her recently published scholarly work, Pygmalion's Chisel: For Women Who Are Never Good Enough (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), Tracy Hallstead MALS ’91 examines the enduring critical presence in contemporary Western culture that scrutinizes, critiques, and sizes women down in their daily lives, despite rights gained through the centuries. The book takes its title from Pygmalion, the ancient mythical sculptor who believed that all women were essentially flawed and endeavored to chisel a statue of the perfect woman, Galatea, for himself. Like the perpetually carved and refined Galatea, women labor under Western culture's a priori assumption that they are flawed, yet…