Tag: 1980s alum

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.

Kathi Ciskowski is at work on a historical piece about a mysterious epidemic that struck Bellingham in the late summer and fall of 1913. Newspapers from all over the country wrote about it, but there were conflicting diagnoses as to the actual cause of the trouble. Around a dozen people died, mostly children. In-depth research on Kathi’s part has not yet revealed the culprit, but she is still engaged with the project!

Luke Lefler works as Manager of Records and Docketing at the Pacific Northwest law firm Lane Powell PC.

In 2018, Paul Lindholdt published his book Making Landfall: Poems with Encircle Publications in Maine, and edited and co-wrote The Spokane River with the University of Washington Press. He also published the essays “Hawk Watching” in Kenyon Review in 2018; “Swaddled in Rose Silk” in Tampa Review in 2019; “Making Landfall,” which was nominated for the John Burroughs Essay Award, on terrain.org in 2019; and “The Rime of the Modern Mariner” in Green Theory and Praxis in 2020.

In a non-traditional use of an English degree, Susan Connelly Maury, with her husband Matthew Maury (1989 WWU business school graduate) spent nearly twenty years living and working in Africa, most of that time with Habitat for Humanity. Through her work with national entities, Susan specialized in organizational development and evaluation and earned a master’s in science in organizational behavior from the University of London. Through this study, Susan became fascinated with research and went on to earn a Ph.D. in psychology at Monash University (awarded 2021). Now living in Melbourne, Australia, Susan conducts research in the overlay of music, social group participation, and well-being, as well as exploring the gendered effects of government policy in her role as a researcher with a community services organization. The writing degree has provided an important foundation across all these endeavors, including most recently writing reports, peer-reviewed journal articles, mainstream articles, and blogs. Susan and Matthew have two teenage sons.