Category: 2022 Alumni News

After thirty-five years at Western, Earlene Kent retired this spring to spend more time with her family. When she began working at the university, she had no training in computers and joined a pool of other women who were doing data entry in Bond Hall on a huge IBM system that was fed with 8-inch diskettes. Through personal initiative and support from key mentors, she worked her way up to leading software trainings across campus, and by the time of her retirement she was Information Technology Specialist in the office of Academic Technology and User Services (ATUS). Earlene’s own inspiring account of her time at Western—of the challenges, accomplishments, friendships, and lessons learned along the way—can be read here.

Claude Atcho’s Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just was published this year by Brazos Press. Claude is a teacher and the pastor of Church of the Resurrection in Charlottesville, VA. Each chapter of his book takes up a theological category for inquiry through a close literary reading and theological reflection on a primary literary text, from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s Native Son to Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

Since its publication in 2020, Katie Mather’s young-adult novel Rage is a Wolf has received a good deal of attention including a starred review from Kirkus, which called it “a work of unusual depth and ambition. It is a climate change novel, yes, but it’s a book about so much more: angst, idealism, self-discovery, and reclaiming the world by reclaiming the narrative. A bold and inventive environmental tale with a striking protagonist.”

Lydia Hagen’s story “The Mother” recently appeared in the May 2022 issue of Apricity Press.

Anastasia Bruckner has been accepted into the prestigious Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies MPhil program at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Since graduating last year, Anastasia moved to Vail, Colorado, where she worked two freelance grant-writing jobs along with a job at a high-end bistro and also learned to ski. After moving to Dublin in the summer of 2022, she will continue the grant-writing work remotely until graduate studies become too much. She is thrilled!

Yousef Abu-Ulbeh was selected to participate in the March 2022 Cinephilia Film Development Workroom. Cinephilia is a New York-based film production company, talent incubator, and consulting agency that champions the next generation of Middle Eastern and African storytellers and filmmakers. Yousef is a Palestinian American writer and public-school educator and currently teaches middle school language arts in Tacoma.

Mikayla Lawrence, who was formerly Assistant Production Editor at Page Street Publishing, has joined HarperCollins Children’s Books as Production Editor.

Colleen Louise Barry’s debut book of poems, Colleen, appeared this year from After Hours Editions. In addition to writing, she runs the interdisciplinary publishing projects Mount Analogue and Angel Tears and teaches visual art at Westside Middle School in Seattle.

Ari Koontz has accepted a fully funded offer to study at Northern Michigan University, which they’ve heard described as “a very queer little program in the woods.” They’ll spend three years there exploring hybrid genre writing toward their MFA and trying out teaching as a potential career path.

 

Veronica Anne Francisco’s piece “To Drown” appeared in the summer 2022 issues of Solstice literary magazine. She is currently a graduate student in the Asian American Studies master’s program at San Francisco State University.