Class Notes

Steven C. Hiscox ’81, who passed away on Nov. 20 2018, was the prototypical Wesleyan student—academically smart in the usual ways, but with wide-ranging and unexpected interests.  Steve was a music major who composed and played classical music for course credit, but then listened to rap music for pleasure, well before it was hip to do so.  He made college look effortless—he was at once scholarly and down to earth, serious and affable.  I well remember the time when he pulled an all-nighter to read Gone with the Windin one sitting!  His passions included pick-up basketball (he was a beast) and cars. He devoured Hot Rod magazine the minute it hit the newsstand, and spent countless hours under the hood of his car acquiring the skills and knowledge that eventually led to his life’s work as the owner of an automotive training school.  I regret that I did not stay in close touch with Steve after Wes, but I will always cherish our friendship during that formative time in our lives.

Thank you to Tom Miceli ’81, P’12, P’17 for this heartfelt tribute.

Herbert D. Kelleher ’53 passed away on Jan. 3, 2019. A full obituary can be found here.

Hey, Class of 2018, hope you are all doing great! Here are some updates: Adriana Phillips is getting her master’s in dance/movement therapy at Sarah Lawrence College. Jason Mitchner is working at Paradigm Talent as a music assistant to continue his passion for music and to stay competitive.

Joanna Paul is working for a nonprofit college access program in Chicago as a reading coach. She is helping first-generation, low-income students from underrepresented backgrounds get the support they need to get into college. She is taking her students to see Hamilton next month and is super excited. She misses y’all.

John Henry Vansant and Sarah Regan are serving as the campaign manager and field organizer for a Democratic campaign for the Colorado House of Representatives.

Diana Dominguez is an intern at the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center. Among other projects, she is doing health education on HPV and recruiting patients for a study on HPV prevalence and persistence in inner city youth. She is very excited to start her position as a care coordinator at Mount Sinai next month. She will be working with high school youth in school based health clinics, navigating them through barriers and advocating between staff for their needs.

Brandon Sides is living in New York. He begins an intensive coding boot camp in January and will work as a web developer upon completion of the course. Out of the 52 New York-based alumni in tech that Brandon reached out to, more than half responded to his cold e-mails! Brandon would like to thank Peter Frank ’12, Nathan Shane ’13, Sam Wheeler ’15, and Tim Devane ’09, who offered their advice or provided career support of some kind.

Jamie Shi, Ray Miao, and Phoebe Chen worked on a Wes alumni art showcase in New York that opened in September. See the poster at magazine.wesleyan.edu.

Thank you to everyone who reached out and be on the lookout for future e-mails to let us know what you are up to!

Najwa Anasse | nanasse@wesleyan.edu
Garett Larivee | glarivee@wesleyan.edu

Brett Keating is in L.A. writing for The Infatuation, which reviews restaurants. He often brings Andrew Hove and Sara Guernsey out to eat with him for an unreliable second or third opinion.

After teaching in the Boston area for three years, Paulina Jones-Torregrosa moved to Chicago to start her PhD in English at Northwestern University. She’d love to see any Wesfolk in the area!

Peter Cornillie was planning a beer dinner with a Detroit restaurant for late October.

Silvia Diaz-Roa has moved back to Connecticut. She just started her master’s in biostatistics at Yale.

Emmett McConnell is finishing up his graduate degree at Medill with a residency at the Johannesburg Citizen covering soccer.

Jaxie Friedman is a zero-waste coordinator for the NYC Department of Education’s Office of Sustainability, implementing recycling/composting programs and working on diverse sustainability initiatives in over 1,800 NYC public schools. Outside of work, she is getting crafty with waste and transforming “trash” into treasures, edible and otherwise.

Steven Susaña-Castillo has started his MPH at Yale in epidemiology of microbial diseases.

LaDarius Drew became the director of student activities at the Gunnery. He has been working on getting the students to involve themselves more outside of campus and in the community.

Earl Lin is still living in Washington, D.C.—though now living in the District proper, as opposed to Arlington, Va., and is still living with Josh Atchley. In June, Earl started working as a paralegal with the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center, a nonprofit civil rights litigation and advocacy law firm that works mainly on issues of criminal justice reform, including police misconduct, prisoner rights, wrongful convictions, and the death penalty. Specifically, as a member of the MacArthur Justice Center’s Appellate Project, Earl gets to work on litigation before higher courts around the country, up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court. In his free time, he’s been trying to take advantage of all D.C. has to offer, including regularly hanging out with fellow Wes alumni in the area and trying to find opportunities to get back into sailing.

Lina Mamut is a product owner at Ahold Delhaize designing tech for brands like Stop and Shop, Hannaford, and Giant.

The weekend of Sept. 14, Kaito Abe played poker with Miranda Linsky ’14, Yohei Okada ’16, and Dan de Rienzo ’11 over locally-produced sake in Kyoto.

Next time let’s go camping!

Jenna Starr | jstarr@wesleyan.edu

Peter Horton, having never really left Middletown, welcomed his friends back for Reunion. Alex Pogosky, Amanda Morrow, and Ashley Swan removed items from the bucket list, with Simoneil Sarbh getting them up in the morning and making the most of each day. Croy Salinas, Will Davis, Allie Carey, and Laura Ligon recounted updates over discounted plates. Ethan Grund and Evan Carmi were fryed to see each other again. Chelsea Lassiter PhD’16 talked house music with Louise Brown (class dean of 2013) and her band, especially the importance of being on time to the rhythm section. Leah Temes and Jenna Bluestein were excited to meet Susanna Banks’ fresh-faced friend in their freshman-year dorm. Lu Corporan was sorely missed at Reunion, his attention needed on the West Coast with a Sinatra event.

Caitlin Aylward and Corey Guilmette celebrated their marriage in August at a crabbing “resort” on Guemes Island, Wash. Syed Ali, Bill Beluch, Chris Ceccolini ’11, Saumya Chatrath, Jaewon Chung, Gabriela De Golia, Marjorie Dodson, Will Durney ’14, Ryu Hirahata, Jessica Jordan, Melanie Koren, Laura Machlin, Anthony Mascolo ’12, Missy McCabe, Kateryn Nunez, Zack Sulsky, Estee Rubien-Thomas, and Lizzie Williams attended.

After earning their master’s degrees at Boston University, Max Kaplan and Kara Wernick ’14 are headed west, as Max pursues his PhD in linguistics at UC Santa Cruz. They are getting married next year.

Sarah Cassel lives in NYC and works at the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, where she focuses on diversion, reentry, and bail reform initiatives. Sarah congratulates the incarcerated students who graduated with associate degrees through Wesleyan’s Center for Prison Education.

Zach Schonfeld returned to Wesleyan for Reunion. He visited the Clark room where he published his first Wesleying post in 2009 and was startled to find it occupied by Bobby Burvant and Jake Blumenthal. After five years in Brooklyn, he moved to Morningside Heights with Rebecca Vaadia. In lieu of a housewarming party, they had a Kate Bush 60th birthday party.

Bryce Hollingsworth is a stone worker in Northampton, Mass. He’s been certified by the Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain and is starting his own business. He will be apprenticing with a certified master craftsman in Australia. Check out his Instagram @stonebearmason and website stonebearhardscapes.com.

Taryn Murray graduated from medical school and is doing a preliminary medicine year at Cleveland Clinic Akron General followed by a dermatology residency at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Marjorie Dodson traveled through Kazakhstan last October with Erin Newport. Marjorie worked remotely while scuba diving around the Pacific, primarily in Bali where she participated in a divemaster training and marine conservation volunteer program. She was lucky enough to make it back stateside in time for Reunion. Marjorie moved to D.C. to pursue a master’s in international affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Emma Daniels joined the LA office of Abernathy MacGregor Group, a leading strategic communications firm. Emma will specialize in crisis management and corporate reputation building.

Anna Swartz got married in August in the Berkshires. There were a few of her classmates in attendance. She and her now wife, Netta Bob, are still enjoying the post-wedding glow.

Evan Hazelett traveled with his partner to New Zealand, Japan, Berlin, Amsterdam, Spain, and Iceland. They ate, hiked, hosteled, trained, and drove across these countries, WWOOFing with five different families. They became good friends with an old Japanese couple and middle-aged Catalonian

man who is rehabilitating a 1,000-year-old farm house and making goat cheese. Now Evan is studying urban planning at Harvard.

Janet Cushey rejoined Argot Partners as the firm’s event manager and app development project lead. She moved to Queens and oversees Patch English, a review service for Korean corporations she founded in 2017.

Kevin Curtin rejoined J.P. Morgan this year as an advisor in the private bank. He provides J.P. Morgan’s banking, credit, and investment advice to wealthy families, institutions, endowments and foundations. He’s been encouraging Wesleyan grads in Boston to meet each other—you should reach out to him and join!

Catherine Doren finished her PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and is doing a postdoc with the Office of Population Research and Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton.

Barbaralynn Moseman resides in East Harlem with her partner and graduated with her master’s in social work from Hunter College. She is a home-based family therapist at New York Foundling.

Prince Emenalo earned his master of public health degree with a concentration in public health management and policy. He is a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity of the Kappa Alpha Sigma Chapter in Stone Mountain, Ga., and also an assistant coach for his little sister’s softball team.

After liquidating all assets associated with his entrepreneurial endeavors, Bennett Kirschner has transitioned into naturalist writing. His new book of essays will be published next February by a small New Orleans press.

Laura Yim | Lyim@wesleyan.edu 

Lots of updates from the Class of 2011! Damian Privitera reports, “I moved back to Connecticut last year with my partner (Evan Perkoski ’10) because Evan started as a professor at UConn. We live in Manchester with our dog (Miley) and I’m working as a lawyer in Hartford. We saw lots of friends at the three Wesleyan weddings we went to this year, including for Nick Matayoshi and Sami Okada, Laura Silver ’08 and her husband, and Darren Thomason and his husband. We also saw Wes friends at the non-Wesleyan weddings because go figure.”

Siena Kramer writes, “I graduated with a B.S. in nursing from The George Washington University and am currently working as a critical care R.N. in Washington, D.C. Glad to be back on the East Coast!”

Margaret Aldredge Diamond and husband Hugo welcomed their son, Hugo, in May.

Max Slater is an attorney and hearing officer for the Allegheny County Health Department in Pittsburgh. As the hearing officer, Max presides over administrative law matters in which parties appeal violations issued by the Health Department. Over the past two years, Max has handled cases ranging from air pollution to landlord-tenant disputes to food safety issues. Max and his wife, Megan, are expecting their first child in February.

Jared Gimbel reports, “My video game about Greenland, Kaverini: Nuuk Adventures, has been delayed, resulting in a 2019 release. The game is set to feature music, sound effects, voice acting, and consultation from several well-known Greenlandic artists.” Jared also spent two weeks last summer in Fiji, having learned Fijian to conversational fluency.

Mallory Cruz writes, “I spoke at the U.N. in April on the abuse of autistic girls and women on International Autism Awareness Day.”

Lindsey Davis tell us, “I’ve been employed since spring as a researcher/writer/editor in the rare books and manuscripts trade. It’s a pretty small circle, and I’d be happy to offer my e-mail address for any student or alumni questions regarding the field.”

Donovan Arthen got married, bought a house, and is working as a leadership development specialist for organizations all over the world.

Ilaria O’Keefe has moved down to Greenville, S.C., for the foreseeable future in connection with her husband’s job. “I’m homeschooling my two older kids, trying to keep the 1-year-old out of trouble, and working part-time as a birth doula and herbal medicine student. Not yet sure how I feel about being in the South . . .”

Harrison Schaaf is living in east L.A., working as a director/cinematographer, traveling often to China and the rest of East Asia for work and adventure.

Kathryn Kulowski Swan is an optometrist based in Connecticut. She opened a practice with her husband, Edmund Swan, in Rocky Hill called Swan Vision Optometry. All Wesleyan students and alumni are welcome! Enjoy a 25 percent discount. #keepwesweirdbutyourvisionclear

Always great to hear from our class. Thanks for your contributions!

Allie Southam | asoutham@wesleyan.edu

Greetings, Class of 2010! Just a few updates this time around from our friends worldwide.

Rachel Shopper is now pursuing a master’s in clinical mental health counseling at Western Carolina University.

David Baranger completed a PhD in neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis, and is a postdoctoral scholar working in psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He is engaged to Tayler Sheahan and will be married in March in Chicagoland. Miles Krieger is a groomsman.

Jessie Schiewe “gave birth to a website in September . . . called OK Whatever (okwhatever.org), it’s an online publication dedicated to weird news and strange stories. Journalism shouldn’t be boring. Read weirder.”

Peter Hull is engaged to Alexandre Staples, and the couple has plans to marry next year! This summer they moved from Boston to Chicago, where Peter is an assistant professor in the University of Chicago’s economics department.

Elizabeth Plantan has had an eventful year: “My husband and I welcomed our first child—a daughter—in June and I finished my PhD in government at Cornell University in August. I am now a postdoctoral fellow at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School from 2018-2020.” Elizabeth looks forward to our upcoming 10-year Reunion in 2020 (gasp!).

That’s all for this issue! Here’s hoping everyone is well and as always, feel free to pass along your life updates anytime. Thank you to everyone for contributing!

David Layne | dlayne@wesleyan.edu

Summer was full of weddings and babies for ’08!

Fourteen years after meeting as freshman at Wesleyan, Constance Smith and Alexander Rosen were married in the Anderson Valley region of Mendocino County, Calif. The ceremony was officiated by Matthew Ball. Daniel Meyer, Ilona Kramer, Eric Lach, Halley Chambers, Rachel Finkelstein, Hans Hsu, Rumman Hossain, James Rosenthal, Jake Levine, Rebecca Rabison, Stephanie O’Brien, Micki Baron, Jamie Hiteshew, Kate Zyskowski, Adam Gomolin ’06, Susannah Ragab ’06, Kyle Gardner ’06, Cara Bayles ’07, AJ Chan ’11, Hilary Burke ’10, and Constance’s sister Clare Smith ’10 were in attendance. Highlights of the evening included singing the Wesleyan fight song and dancing to Mgmt’s “Kids.”

Emily Einhorn and Jeff Wong had a baby this summer, Justin Edward Einhorn-Wong, born on June 11.

Silverio J. Vasquez and Jennifer Veloz ’10 got married this summer as well. Silverio writes, “If not for Wes, we would’ve never met!”

Rachel Bedick wasn’t able to make it to the Rreunion “because I gave birth to my son Tobias on May 6. In addition to being a mom, I started a new job as a clinical social worker embedded in a pediatrician’s office in Beverly, Mass., where I provide therapy to young people.”

Nathan Strand and his wife relocated to Colombia, where he will be working at the U.S. Agency for International Development Mission in Bogota for the next two years. They are already enjoying the great food, mild climate, warm local culture, and abundant adventures that Colombia has to offer.

Liat Olenick canvassed so hard to elect progressive candidates who are also decent human beings.

Lynn Favin has had an incredibly busy year in Los Angeles. She signed with William Morris Endeavors for voice acting and recorded another set of characters for the Emmy award-winning animated show Robot Chicken. After performing with the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles in Macbeth, she joined the Actor’s Equity Association and was invited to be the inaugural equity guest artist for LMU’s new outdoor company Shakespeare on the Bluff, starring as Desdemona in Othello and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She will be performing with them in Pericles next summer.

Alicia Collen Zeidan | acollen@wesleyan.edu

Hello, classmates! Can you believe it’s been 15 years since we entered Wesleyan as freshman? Since our last class update, we’ve been busy! Megan Kretz Harrington here to share the ’07 news. I’m currently knee deep in baby days—my husband (Brian), 2-year-old son (Teddy), and I recently welcomed a baby girl to our family. Evelyn Nancy Harrington was born on Aug. 20. Several other classmates have been growing their families.

Ben Levinger and his wife, Alicia, recently bought a house in Severna Park, Md. They have two young children—Desmond and Oren.

In November 2017, all members of 88 Home reunited in Milwaukee for the marriage of Chris Keeler and Asma Kadri. This included Thomas Coen, Sally Smyth, her wife, Susannah Hook-Rodgers; Meredith Katz, her husband Dave Korkoian, Mer and Dave’s daughter, Addison; Kara Brodgesell, her husband, Noah Christman; and Daphne Clyburn and her husband Michael MacEwen. The 88 Home ties remain strong! In other news, Michael and Daphne relocated to the D.C. area in June 2017 and love it. Daphne is teaching Spanish at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School (Potomac, Md.) and stepped into the role of department head. She says, “Teaching continues to be a beautiful and messy mix of joy and rigor!”

Victor Scavera married Dorothy Sliva on Mother’s Day. He adds, “Although it was not, strictly speaking, a present, we figured that it couldn’t hurt.” Newman Hoffman ’09, Daniel Glyck, Andrew Smith ’08, Ben Roberts ’09, Michael DeFranco ’10, and Professor Westmoreland attended.

Eric Altneu says, “I got married in August! My husband is Brookes Hammock.” The happy couple had plenty of alumni in attendance including: Tory Molnar Masterson, Julia Perciasepe, Ellen Werble, Andrew Bleeker, Samantha Kantor, Erich Klothen ’08, John Haley, Matt Donne, Ben Byers, Andrew Inchiosa, Josh Tanz ’06, Dan Devine ’06. Others in attendance were Eric’s mom and stepdad, Carol Murphy ’79 and Robert Murphy ’79, and family friend Seta Nazarian ’79.

As a class, we’ve also had a number of professional and personal adventures . . . Deanne Dworski-Riggs has been keeping it wild in Mongolia with Kimberly Greenberg—living in gers, riding horses on the Mongolian steppe, and climbing turtle rocks!

Cortney A. Duncan started a new job as the director of athletics at Kent School. She is also the school’s varsity field hockey and lacrosse coach.

Youkyung Lee joined Bloomberg as a government reporter covering Korea, including the unpredictable leader on the North and the U.S. foreign policy toward Korea.

She is based in Seoul, South Korea, with her two cats. You can follow her stories and behind-the-scene notes on her Twitter @YKreports. She welcomes any story suggestions or any questions you might have about Korean politics or Kim Jong Un. You are also welcome to say hello to her on the Bloomberg Terminal.

Lina Makdisi recently sat a three-month silent meditation retreat at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass.

Keep the updates coming!

Megan Harrington | wesleyan007@gmail.com

Victoria Belyavsky Pinsky | victoriapinsky@gmail.com