Author: etaylor

Please write to your class secretaries.

Michael Lewis and his husband, David Scott, adopted a baby boy, George Scott Lewis, earlier this year. They have enjoyed bonding with him by taking long walks around their neighborhood in Berkeley and a few road trips around California.

     Matt Kushner has been slowly emerging from the cocoon of isolation with Lauren Kushner (Brown ’04) and kids Mimi (6) and Tessa (3.5). Matt has been freelancing at Radical Media as the head of pipeline/CG supervisor on a new immersive theater experience called Illuminarium (www.illuminarium.com) whose first show, Wild, premieres on the Atlanta Beltline in July. He’s also excited to have been a small part of Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s ’02 In the Heights, getting to do some visual effects on the film adaptation, now in theaters. Lauren is a staff CG artist at the Museum of Natural History in NYC, where she created 3D and 2D screen content for the renovation of the Gems and Minerals exhibit, which opened in June. Mimi is completing a year of virtual kindergarten, while Tessa is finishing home preschool, and both are excited to attend in-person summer programs and first grade and pre-K in the fall. Matt and family are looking forward to re-engaging in the world, and attending some mini-Wes reunions this summer.

Those with class notes, please contact your class secretary.

Thanks for writing in, everybody.

     Kyle Judge is currently working in the music business as an executive and manager of such notable acts who are signed to major record labels such as Young Devyn (4th & B’way/ Island Records), Souly Had (Island Records), Dru Oliver (Grammy-nominated vocal producer and platinum-selling songwriter) and Lyrique J (platinum-selling songwriter on Chris Brown’s Indigo album).  You can find them all on Instagram. He is also the executive producer of a project by Young Devyn released this summer on 4th & B’way / Island Records.

    Raymond Kuo has joined the RAND Corporation as a political scientist, continuing his research on security issues in Asia.

From Andrea Donnelly: “Last I wrote, I’d started a spiritual healing business, We Are Here 2 Remember, which has taken off like a rocketship in the past few months. I am primarily doing spiritual mentorship for founders and CEOs.” She was recently featured on Yahoo, Halle Berry’s new site rē-spin, and podcasts including Chakra Girl Radio and Hello Universe. By the time this is published, a two-part interview with Ali Levine, former Bravo Reality Star, about her work will be released on her podcast Everything with Ali Levine. “My talk with Ali is beyond a dream come true. I was an American Studies major and this feels like the perfect mash-up of my intellectual + spiritual curiosity and forevergreen love of pop culture. If anyone wants to learn more about my work you can email me at andrea@wearehere2remember.com or www.wearehere2remember.com.”

From Jenny Selgrath: “Last year I started a position at the NOAA Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary where I do research focusing on the intersection of coastal communities and ocean ecosystems. As a result my pup and I moved to Santa Barbara, which has been a sweet place to be for COVID. Lots of road biking, outdoor yoga, and my first West African Dance class since Wesleyan—this time at the beach.

    Don Kim moved to Century City and hopes there are some Wes folks in the area!

    Amy Larkin Gelbach is living in Richmond, Virginia, and will be teaching life skills to 6th–8th graders at Brookland Middle School this year.

    Karen Gross enjoyed emceeing our virtual 20th Class Reunion, seeing familiar faces, and connecting candidly about life in pandemic times. She recently launched a new podcast called She Rocked It, dedicated to raising the volume on women’s voices (and a clear continuation of her Womanist House days). You can tune in on podcast platforms, YouTube, and at www.sherockedit.com. Karen is also still running her speechwriting and communications consulting company. She currently serves as the speechwriter for one of the nation’s most influential public health leaders.

    Lisa Kagan recently released a book of poetry and art entitled Coming Home to Myself. Spanning a decade of growth and change, this book honors the importance of following your inner compass through exploring nine essential elements of the human experience: courage, passion, patience, grace, faith, resilience, wonder, gratitude, and renewal. Serving as an intimate companion for navigating life’s passages, this collection is an ode to the kindness and generosity that the world desperately needs and the power of turning that caring towards ourselves. You can purchase your copy here:

https://familyheirloomarts.com/products/coming-home-to-myself-poetry-and-art-by-lisa-kagan/

From Brenna Cothran: “I’m happily surrounded by Wes alums wherever I go (not that I’ve been going anywhere this past year). Alice Jankell ’83 and her family live down the hall from my family’s apartment. I’ve been working at the Whitney Museum of American Art as an exhibitions registrar for the past 5 1/2 years, where I collaborate often with Lauren (Tehan) DiLoreto ’97. I’m co-class parent for my son Max’s first grade class along with Georgia (Silvera) Seamans ’98 (I also have a daughter, Sammy, who is about to finish fifth grade). When travel is possible, trips to my hometown mean that I get to see my sister Rallie (Nepveux) Snowden ’96. And of course, long walks with my dog while wearing my (now-20-year-old) Wesleyan sweatshirt have led to many random connections with fellow alums on the sidewalks and in the parks of NYC.

My beloved housemates of 51 Fountain are still going strong! Isaac Eddy was awarded tenure and a promotion to associate professor at Northern Vermont University–Johnson where he is the chair of the Performing Arts Department. He is also on the committee to merge all Vermont State College System campuses to ensure they all remain open and continue to provide affordable liberal arts education to rural Vermonters. He directed an original performance, The Monument, devised by an ensemble of NVU students, which won a national Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival “Citizen Artist” award during the Spring ‘21 semester. One highlight of this difficult year was zooming Wes 2001 artists into his classes including Kate Purdy and Woody Fu.

I also need to admit something to you, dear reader. I didn’t intend to miss the online Reunion and certainly didn’t intend to omit telling you about it. I actually didn’t know about it. Is an email hiding in one of the many confounding layers of purgatory known as spam quarantine (such a charming name prior to 2020)? Probably. Would I have attended and then missed your actual faces and daydreamed/Zoomdreamed of walking all the way up Foss Hill with you instead? Definitely.

Those with class notes, please contact your class secretary.

In 2019, Davis Thompson-Moss opened Crown Heights Healing, a community yoga, reiki and sound healing studio in Brooklyn.  After the pandemic hit, it became a Zoom space for people to meditate, do yoga and stay connected, open to all people, all levels. Much to his joy, Wesleyan friends come through regularly: Chris Coyle, Jake Kheel, Kabir Sen, Phil Frank, Allegra Jones, Josh Harris, Daniel Lawren, Rachel Ostrow, Miriti Murungi, Danny Forster, Keith Witty ’01.  If you’re seeking a physical or meditation practice, reach out at davistmoss@gmail.com.

Although Tara Cohen and her family relocated from the Bay Area to southeast Michigan more than five years ago, it still feels new in many ways. One of her all-time favorite things in Michigan is the wild black raspberry season in their backyard; the gorgeous pinks and purples mark the beginning of summer. There’s never a dull moment at their house with two energetic kiddos (a rising first grader and a preschooler) and their elderly dog and cat. Tara works for the county’s Community & Economic Development Department where she manages the CDBG program for affordable housing and public infrastructure improvement projects. In November 2020, her spouse was elected as Clerk of the Township, so she’s also getting a taste for being married to an elected official, something no one trains you for 🙂 If anyone is passing through the Ann Arbor area, please say hello!

   Katie Redwine has been having an inappropriate amount of fun these days. She has the pleasure of meeting new people every week performing autism assessments virtually and loves the cognitive rigor and emotional depth of those experiences. In her other waking hours, she’s fascinated watching her 12-year-old son navigate adolescence and her 10-year-old son fling himself headlong into every new situation. Both boys earned their black belts in tae kwon do this spring. Katie and her husband have tackled many home projects, and can now do so with harmony, which everyone who’s gone through the renovation process knows is a feat in itself!  Her family has been hosting outdoor bashes during COVID and they’re traveling again, complete with surf lessons in Sayulita.  Plus, Katie was told by several folks that she can now speak Spanish like a 6 year old, which makes her inordinately proud.

   Chad Bartell and his wife Julie took a two-week trip to the Galapagos Islands in May and saw wildlife both above sea level and below. After a COVID-related downsizing at his company of nearly 10 years where he was in-house counsel, Chad now practices business law with a small firm in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. He performs regularly in the summer with the steel drum band he founded in 2016. He and Julie have two boys, 11 and 13.

Rachel Ostrow showed new paintings at Planthouse Gallery in NYC this fall.  The opening was on October 28th.

   Leander Dolphin was elected co-managing partner of Shipman & Goodwin LLP. She previously served on the firm’s Management Committee.  She continues to practice law as a member of and partner in School Law Practice Group and has dedicated her career to advising educational institutions and organizations.

   Erik Rueter gave a webinar about diversity, equity and inclusion for Project Management Institute that has almost five thousand viewers (live plus on demand). He also guest lectured about structural racism in oncology care for Mattitiyahu Zimbler’s ’01 classes on prejudice at Boston College and at Emerson.  His paper on strategies to address racism in oncology care is in review and will hopefully be published in Oncology Nursing Journal.

   Rachel Afi Quinn earned tenure at University of Houston where she was promoted to associate professor in the Comparative Cultural Studies Department and the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program. Her first book Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo was published with University of Illinois Press in late July. Rachel and her partner Eesha Pandit have been building the social justice South Asian feminist community South Asian Youth in Houston Unite and coordinated their fifth annual summer institute for South Asian youth in Texas this year.

As for your class secretaries, it was a summer of reconnecting and change!  Kevin and his family escaped from their house in New Jersey and spent the summer on Sebago Lake in Maine.  He caught up with Darryl in Freeport and visited Professor Emeritus Richard Miller, who hasn’t lost a beat of his sharp wit.  In September, Kevin started a new gig at Virta Health, working on reversing Type 2 diabetes.  Meanwhile, Darryl and his husband traveled to New Jersey and Ohio to see family who they hadn’t seen for nearly two years.

May the new year be full of good health and wonderful surprises! Hope to hear from you in 2022!

Hello fellow ‘98ers.

It was great to hear from a few of you, and from some farther off spots than usual. Please keep sending in your notes and sightings. I know we would all love to hear a whole range of everyone’s experiences.

Here is the most recent news:

Jehan Manekshaw continues to live in Mumbai with his family—wife Shez and two kids Aden, 7, and Zaya, 3—and have been, like every other family on the planet, dealing with the balance of WFH, Zoomschooling, and staying safe. He continues to run two organizations now in the digital/blended medium: the Drama School Mumbai, and with his wife Shez, Theatre Professionals Education, which focuses on giving schoolteachers the tools from drama with which to do a lot more in their classes. He really misses Miller’s Pond in the summer.

It’s been a long 1.5 pandemic year for Sarah Margon, with both her boys (8.5 and 11.5) doing virtual school until this May (when they returned for just a couple days a week) and her husband and her working from home—sharing an office for much of the time—after nearly 20 years of regular travel for them both. They are nonetheless all healthy and know they are lucky and are so grateful to science for the vaccines that have led to cautiously returning to some version of the “before times.” To that end, Sarah got to join a “just what we all needed” NYC dinner with Amy Rowland (Abbazia), Danielle Woodrow, Emma Cooper-Serber (‘97) and Lauren (Tehan) DiLoreto ‘97 in late May where they laughed and hugged and laughed some more. For the most part, Sarah is now relishing the time at home and with family as she has been nominated by President Biden to be the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. It’s a tremendous honor, with no lack of urgent issues on which to focus. She reports confirmation will hopefully happen by early fall and then she’ll hit the ground running with a grueling schedule, to carrying out the president’s and secretary’s agenda and restoring the U.S. government’s commitment to meaningful human rights and democracy around the world.

Nathan Eddy reports life is good in London—though lockdown restrictions in the UK have made him miss family and friends in New England. He’s been serving as Interim Director of the Council of Christians and Jews since September. CCJ is the oldest interfaith organization in the UK, and their patron is the Queen. He finds it a privilege to be leading dialogue over Israel-Palestine, Holocaust education, and theological education for clergy and rabbis.

Sarah Miller Lipton is happily working at Kaiser Permanente in the Occupational Medicine department in Panorama City, California. She and her husband Glenn have two boys, ages 8 and 6 years old. They are busy with all the kids’ activities—baseball, soccer, tennis, and swimming! They are looking forward to a nice summer in Los Angeles and enjoying the warm weather. Wishing everyone from Wesleyan good health!

Nathan Camp is returning to Connecticut after two decades out west. He is joining Yale University’s Office of International Affairs and looks forward to reconnecting with New England friends and alumni.

I, meanwhile, have been searching out open camping spots, trying to remember, and slowly regain, the feeling of having real-life social activities, and looking for ways to make the world just a little bit better– so send those ideas too, we could all use them.

Best,

Abby

Hey fellow ’96ers. Hope this message finds you all well in our 25th Wesleyan Reunion year. It warmed my heart to see so many of you at the Reunion festivities.Thanks to the Reunion committee that put together a superb program to reconnect us all.

Over the summer months I have connected with other Wes folks that crossed paths with us in 1996—Lucius Outlaw ’93 and Brande Fulgencio ’97, Andy McGadney ’92 and Robert “Bobbito” Garcia ’88.

   Stacey Samuels sends news that she joined a Midwest college tour with Kristen Worrell and her next generation college students—both her twins. Of course their first visit was to dear old Wesleyan at the start of the process.

   Tracie Broom is happy to report that the branding and marketing agency she co-founded in 2010, Flock and Rally, made it through the pandemic and recently was honored with five South Carolina Public Relations Society of America Mercury Awards of Excellence and three Palmetto Awards of Excellence from the South Carolina chapter of the International Business Communicators of America. Tracie and her business partner were just recognized by the regional alt weekly paper in its “Power List” of the top 30 people who shape Columbia, South Carolina’s culture, and the firm just landed a two-year contract to provide communications services to the National Science Foundation’s new Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA). When she’s not practicing the fine art of delegating at work, she can be found chilling in the pool with her partner Scott and his teen daughter, harvesting zinnias, okra and eggplant in her garden, and making long overdue travel plans to visit fellow Wes alums like Kate Baker in Mexico.

   Shola Olatoye and Matthew Strozier send news that they moved their brood of three (15, 13 and 6) kids to the West Coast during the pandemic from New York City. Matthew is still with The Wall Street Journal and Shola is heading up Oakland’s housing and community development department. They scored housing by renting Susan Yee and her husband’s lovely house. Their Oakland Wes “campus” saw socially distanced visits from Jake Ward and his family and Phil Cho ’95 and his wife. They have since bought their own place in this crazy Bay Area housing market (someone should really do something about that!). They have frequent Zoom cocktails with Tracey Gardner, Randy Slaughter and Aisha Cook, who all now live in Westchester County.They look forward to a fall holiday trip East where we can see all our Wes peeps in real life!

   Cathy Thomas writes that she is an assistant professor in the Department of English at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She writes, “My research and teaching covers Caribbean literature and carnival culture, Black feminist thought and play, comic books, science studies, TV/visual and media culture.”

   Danièle Côté (formerly Daniele Bucar) writes that she made the move to Maine about 15 years ago, got married, changed career to nursing, and now has two kids—an 8-year-old girl and a 6- year-old son—with her husband who is an occupational therapist. She’s worked in a number of areas of the nursing profession but is currently a circulating nurse for a local hospital’s surgical department.

She keeps in touch regularly with a few of our 1996 classmates and one of her best friends who is class of 1997, but if anyone is in the Maine, New Hampshire, or Massachusetts area, she would love to hear updates on her fellow New Englanders!

That’s all for now and I am sticking with it—I always enjoy catching-up with all of you so feel free to always drop me a line with news to update folks with!

Yours in the MoCon bond.

Hello fellow ’95ers!

Bo Bell writing here with updates, starting with some sad news from Danny Greene, Leslie (Katz) Genova, and Sarah Hirzel: Our dear friend and classmate Andy Neiman passed away in June. Leslie, Danny, Sarah, Gregg Osofsky, Jennifer (Scheff) Ransburg, Tomer Rothschild ’94, and Jessica Sharzer ’94 gathered in St. Louis to remember him at a memorial service, with many more Wes friends joining online. Many of you will remember Andy’s energy, creativity, and his pie-themed parties. He was a one-of-a-kind person and friend, and we miss him terribly. Donations in Andy’s memory may be made to the National Alliance of Mental Illness, the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, or to his family. We hope everyone will see a Shakespeare play and eat a slice of pie in his memory.

Former class secretary Dwayne Busby was recently appointed to the board of directors of JSC Federal Credit Union, strengthening that institution’s connection to University of Houston–Clear Lake, where Dwayne is executive director of Strategic Partnerships. Dwayne said that he’s so excited about this, because JSC FCU recently finalized their new strategic plan that aimed to become more of a digital resource to the community to which it provides financial resources; his joining the board is helping the credit union become more agile in that way. Nice work, Dwayne!

     “Meanne” Jeanne Bonner writes: “All is well in Connecticut where I moved in 2017 with my partner and my son, Leo, who is now 9. I’m headed to New York in August for a short-term fellowship I won at the New York Public Library to do some research on an Italian writer who survived the Holocaust and whose work I am translating into English. I still work part-time as a news editor at CNN while also teaching writing and literature part-time. I sometimes even teach at Wes! When I returned to campus in 2019, I felt as though I was walking with the ghosts of Jeanne Past! It was actually a thrill, and the campus has changed in some very good ways. Lots of benches to sit back and enjoy!”

     Scott Rubin just started a new position as Assistant Vice President of Development at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Looking forward to advancing Einstein’s social justice mission and raising funds for groundbreaking research and top-notch medical education.

    Cheryl Mejia continues her work in interventional pain management, working several offices in rural western Maryland, with ownership in surgery centers on the horizon. She’s still supporting LGBT, diversity, and inclusion programs through her wife’s job as LGBT nurse navigator at Hopkins, and she also volunteers, does board work, and helps charities.

     Tavia Nyongo is still teaching at Yale, where “I was recently named chair and William Lampson Professor of Theater and Performance Studies. I’m also active in American Studies, African American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. After a busy year teaching remotely, I’m looking forward to returning (safely) to the classroom soon.”

     Jason Segal reports, “After 13 years working in climate-related finance, our business, Javelin Capital, is overwhelmed with opportunity as investing in ESG themes has become mainstream. I hope to connect with more fellow climate finance travelers from Wes. Kids (Julia 7, Ari 6) continue to be enjoying life in and around NYC with plenty of time at the beach this summer. Very happy to see them growing up in NYC and attending public schools here—something I never had the opportunity to do. We are pulling for NYC and hanging in through these choppy waters.”

     Ryan Knox was recently named Dean of Students at New Haven Academy, an urban, collegiate-prep charter school.  He’s also in final negotiations to publish his book about his experience during the student protests in Hong Kong, where he also taught and resided as an expat from 2011 to 2015. Ryan lives with his partner, garden, and goldfish in the Little Italy section of New Haven, Connecticut.

     Josh Gilbert writes, I’m happy to let everyone know that my and Carey Bartell’s daughter, Eloise (’25), is now a frosh at Wes, exactly 30 years after we all matriculated! Excited to have great excuses to get back on campus. Also, Temperance Beer Co. (the brewery I founded in 2013 but is perhaps better remembered as the official beer of our 25th Reunion) once again hosted our four-day outdoor concert, Out of Space, on Labor Day weekend. It’s kind of like Spring Fling but without Foss Hill. This year’s acts were Big Boi, J.D. McPherson & the Drive-By Truckers, Neko Case, and (former Spring Fling performer) George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic.