Robert Stothart’s essay “Company Town” appeared in West Branch in winter 2021. His essay “Opera House” appeared in The Missouri Review in spring 2021 after winning the journal’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for nonfiction the previous year. Robert still remembers the remarkable friendship and teaching of George Muldrow and Marjorie Donker from his time at Western.
Joshua Bird (BA 2014)
After graduating from Western in June 2014, Joshua Bird moved to Scotland to pursue a Master of Public Policy (MPP) at the University of Edinburgh, where he lives to this day. Since completing graduate school he has worked in a variety of policy and analytical roles across the Scottish public, academic, private, and third sectors. He currently works for the Scottish Government, employed as a statistician in the Department of COVID Public Health. (In the photo he can be seen with Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, during pre-pandemic times.) Joshua is thrilled to be working the civil service, especially in an area as important and timely as this. Although the position is perhaps an unusual destination for an English Literature graduate, he can say with confidence that he uses the skills gained during his studies at Western daily. He sends shout outs to Professors Lysa Rivera and Nicole Brown, both of whom were indispensable to his development as an undergraduate.
Madelynn Romano (BA 2017)
Madelynn Romano (formerly Esteb) works as an Associate in Creative Enterprise at WONGDOODY, an international human experience company driven by insights and forged in creativity. Her interdisciplinary work spans creative, user experience, and marketing to craft relevant and intuitive digital experiences that drive revenue and loyalty. She is currently living and working out of Munich, Germany, as a part of the company’s European operation. Her background in liberal arts allows her to stand apart as a critical thinker, researcher, and empathetic individual. She uses the skills she learned during her time at Western to cross cultures, languages, and abilities in order to create engaging and delightful digital experiences for all.
Thomas Martinsen (MA 1976)
Eight years after retiring as an English teacher at the Milwaukee Technical College, Thomas Martinsen still enjoys reading. Most recently, he finished and enjoyed The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith.
Paul Lindholdt (BA 1978, MA 1980)
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.
Emily Reynolds (BA 2009)
Emily Reynolds was recently hired as a writer and editor for the video game review site, gameravenreview.com. Marrying her passions for writing and video games, the job is a dream come true!
Susan Connelly Maury (BA 1988)
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.
Jane Wong
Jane Wong’s second collection of poetry How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) was longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and was featured in The New York Times, NPR, Boston Globe, Shondaland, Publisher’s Weekly, and more. During her book tour, she performed at over 40 venues virtually and in-person, including the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival, The Los Angeles Festival of Books, and more. Her debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, is forthcoming from Tin House in 2023. An interdisciplinary artist as well, she exhibited her poetry installation work alongside the artist duo Mizzonk for “Nourish” at the Richmond Art Gallery in 2022. Forthcoming poems and essays will appear in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult), and What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People (University Press of Kentucky). Along with receiving the 2021-2022 Woodberry Poetry Room Fellowship from Harvard University and a 2021 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award, she is the 2022 recipient of the Peter J. Elich Teaching Award at WWU. She also adopted the cutest rescue pup named Panko.
Kami Westhoff
Kami Westhoff’s story collection, The Criteria, appeared this May from Unsolicited Press, and her poetry chapbook, Cloudbound, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.
The Criteria explores unconventional, and at times highly problematic, motherhood. The characters struggle with impossible choices that often lead to heartbreaking behaviors. In the title story, the main character takes on the burden of breastfeeding infants whose mothers have fallen ill while at the same time struggling with the fate of her own infant. Another story imagines a scenario in which the mother/child bond is prohibited and drastic measures are taken to ensure its prevention. The characters are asked to suffer many tragedies, but also to embrace hope in the most unlikely places.
Kami is an award-winning poet and short story writer. She is also the author of two other poetry chapbooks— Sleepwalker, which won Minerva Rising’s Dare to Be contest, and Your Body a Bullet, co-written with Elizabeth Vignali—and her prose has appeared in various journals including Booth, Carve, Hippocampus, Passages North, Meridian, Waxwing, and West Branch.
Katherine Anderson
Katherine Judith Anderson’s book, Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain, was published in April 2022 by The Ohio State University Press. Twisted Words examines torture across the fiction, periodicals, and government documents of the British Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Placing acts of torture and words about torture in relation to changing definitions of citizenship and human rights, Anderson argues that torture—as a technique of state terrorism—evolved in relation to nineteenth-century liberalism, combining the traditional definition of exceptional acts of cruelty with systemic, banal, or everyday violence. Analyzing canonical novels by George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith alongside an impressive array of lesser-known fiction through the lenses of critical terrorism studies and political, legal, and phenomenological theory, Anderson rethinks torture as a mode of reclaiming an embodied citizenship and demonstrates how the Victorians ushered in our modern definition of torture. Furthermore, she argues that torture is foundational to Western modernity since liberalism was, and continues to be, dependent on state-sanctioned—and at times state-sponsored—torture, establishing parallels between Victorian liberal thought and contemporary (neo)imperialism and global politics.