David LowMay 12, 20102min
This year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Tinkers by Paul Harding, was a bit of a surprise. The book had gotten excellent reviews (though it wasn’t reviewed by The New York Times) and was pushed by independent book sellers. But it was far from a slam dunk for a prestigious literary prize. Even more surprising is the publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, where Erika Goldman '81 is editorial director. This is the first small publisher to release a Pulitzer fiction winner since Louisiana State University Press published A Confederacy of Dunces. Bellevue Literary Press is part of New York University’s School…

David LowMay 12, 20101min
Bill Shapiro '87 has edited an entertaining and often fascinating book, Other People’s Rejection Letters (Clarkson Potter), in which he has collected 150 rejection letters sent to famous and ordinary people and presented exactly as they were written. The letters included are surprisingly varied, sent by text message, e-mail and by the U.S. Postal Service, and messages are handwritten, typed, illustrated and scrawled in lipstick and crayon. Alongside letters rejecting Gertrude Stein, Andy Warhol and Jimi Hendrix, readers can peruse notes from former lovers, relatives, would-be bosses, potential publishers, universities, Walt Disney Productions, the pope and even “the Private Office…

David LowMay 12, 20101min
Paul Lewis ’88, an assistant professor in the School of Architecture, Princeton University, is also a partner at LTL Architects (Lewis.Turumaki.Lewis) in New York City. LTL Architects is one of five teams commissioned by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center to produce work featured at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53 Street, 212-708-9400) exhibition, Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront. This project addresses one of the most urgent challenges facing the nation's largest city: sea-level rise resulting from global climate change. The exhibit is open from now until Oct. 11.

David LowMay 12, 20103min
Brothers Jeff and Michael Zimbalist ’02 have directed The Two Escobars, a documentary about the infiltration of drug money into professional soccer in Colombia during the 1980s and ’90s. The subjects of the film are Pablo Escobar, a founder of the Medellin cartel who poured some of his wealth from cocaine trafficking into pro soccer, and Andrés Escobar, a star of the national team who accidentally kicked a ball into his own team’s goal at the 1994 World Cup. The film was screened at the  Tribeca Film Festival in New York City in April as part of the World Documentary Competition.…

David LowMay 12, 20101min
Beautiful new work by veteran photographer Michael Yamashita ’71 may be viewed online in the May issue of National Geographic. His photos accompany an article “The Forgotten Road” by Mark Jenkins who traces the remnants of the legendary trail in China that served as a trading route for tea and Tibetan horses. The ancient passageway once stretched almost 1,400 miles across the chest of Cathay, from Yaan, in the tea-growing region of Sichuan Province, to Lhasa, the almost 12,000-foot-high capital of Tibet.

Cynthia RockwellMay 12, 20103min
In an "Executive Profile," the Atlanta Business Chronicle (April 23–29, 2010) highlighted the efforts of Matthew Winn ’92, managing director, Cushman & Wakefield of Georgia, Inc., who is running his third marathon with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's Team in Training program. Winn will be running to honor his 5-year-old nephew, Nicholas, the son of Amanda Winn Lee ’94, on June 6. That same day will be the five-year anniversary of Nicholas’s remission from acute myelogenous leukemia. Winn, himself the father of two children, wears a purple "Team in Training" bracelet, indicating his commitment to this group of athletes who…

Cynthia RockwellMay 12, 20104min
This month, Jeff Laszlo '78 and his family will accept the Environmental Law Institute's prestigious National Wetlands Award for Landowner Stewardship in a ceremony in Washington, D.C. The National Wetlands Awards are presented annually to individuals who have excelled in wetlands protection, restoration and education. The Trust for Public Land calls the O’Dell Creek Headwaters and Wetlands Restoration Project “an ambitious multi-year effort to restore and enhance one of the most significant and important wetlands complexes in Montana.” Laszlo’s family had settled on the land in the 1930s, when his great-grandfather began a 14,000-acre cattle ranch. O’Dell Creek, an important…

Bill HolderApril 21, 20103min
Amy Bloom ’75, a distinguished writer of novels, short stories, nonfiction, and projects for television, has been named the Kim-Frank Family University Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University. Her appointment takes effect July 1. Bloom will enhance Wesleyan’s curricular offerings in writing by offering two courses per year, and she will serve as a senior thesis advisor. She will have an office in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center. “Amy Bloom is one of the most accomplished writers in the United States today,” says President Michael S. Roth. “Her insight, her creativity, and her deep understanding of the craft of writing…

Cynthia RockwellApril 21, 20102min
MusicianCorps, the brainchild of CEO and founder Chris “Kiff” Gallagher ’91, was the subject of a March 8 segment on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. National correspondent John Yang ’81 reported, interviewing Gallagher and a number of the MusicianCorps Fellows and students and showing footage of their music classes. Modeled after such programs as Americorps and City Year, Gallagher’s nonprofit Music National Service launched MusicianCorps to offer a job and paycheck to musicians eager to make a difference in a community by sharing their passion for music in an under-resourced teaching environment. The students benefitting from MusicianCorps — dubbed…

David LowApril 21, 20102min
Missed Connections, a short documentary directed and produced by Mary Robertson ’01, will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan in April. Once found on the back pages of local papers, Missed Connections is a forum on Craigslist where those who regret their timidity make appeals to the "Ones Who Got Away." Robertson’s documentary peers inside these popular online messages-in-a-bottle asking whether love lost can be found again. Robertson is a producer and director of nonfiction media. For television she has produced and directed long- and short-form documentary programs for major broadcasters. She recently completed work…

David LowApril 21, 20102min
The sophomore effort Congratulations was released by electro-pop duo MGMT (a.k.a. Ben Goldwasser ’05 and Andrew VanWyngarden ’05) this month and covered by media across the United States and abroad. Goldwasser and VanWyngarden first wrote and played their music as students at Wesleyan and found success after graduation that many musicians would die for. They were signed to the major label Columbia, and their full-length debut album, Oracular Spectacular, went gold on the Billboard charts with more than three million songs downloads globally. They had a hit single, “Time to Pretend” that won adoring fans who started to dress like…

Cynthia RockwellApril 21, 20103min
National Geographic Entertainment has picked up the rights to Restrepo, the documentary by journalists Sebastian Junger ’84 and Tim Hetherington that follows a platoon of American soldiers in Afghanistan. The film won the Sundance Film Festival grand jury documentary prize and is set for release on June 2. The National Geographic channel, which has worldwide TV rights, will broadcast the film next fall. The film was named after a 15-man outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, considered one of the most dangerous postings in the U.S military. “From May 2007 to July 2008, Hetherington and Junger dug in with a platoon of…