Ann-Janine Morey ’73 had a photography exhibit at the Wilson Downtown Gallery in Harrisonburg, Virginia, Aug. 3–Sept. 28, 2018. Defy the Machine paired photographs of horses, the original anti-machine, with photos from political events by a colleague and other images that suggest resistance. Morey is the founder and owner of Free Spirit Photography LLC, specializing in documenting equine therapies, horses, and anything else that catches her eye.
Seth Hanson ’17 has released his first album, Not Too Deep, which is largely about his experiences living in and eventually leaving Grinnell. The album is available for download from Bandcamp at theadditionalsix.bandcamp.com.
In Kicking Center: Gender and the Selling of Women’s Professional Soccer (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Rachel Allison ’07 investigates a women’s soccer league seeking to break into the male-dominated center of U.S. professional sport. Allison details the complex constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the selling and marketing of women’s soccer in a half-changed sports landscape characterized by both progress and backlash, and where professional sports are still understood to be men’s territory. Allison is an assistant professor of sociology and faculty affiliate of gender studies at Mississippi State University in Starkville.
Dr. Mick Perez-Cruet ’83 has published a textbook, An Anatomical Approach to Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery, second edition (Thieme Publishers, 2018). Perez-Cruet is vice chairman, director, and professor of the Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery and Spine Program at the William Beaumont School of Medicine, Oakland University, in Auburn Hills, Michigan.
Co-authored by Erica K. Yamamura and Kent Koth ’90, Place-Based Community Engagement in Higher Education: A Strategy to Transform Universities and Communities (Stylus Publishing, 2018) explores a new paradigm for community engagement in higher education, focusing intensely on community impact within a neighborhood.
“My career has focused on connecting campus and community through service-learning and extensive community partnerships,” Koth writes. “I discovered this passion through service and volunteerism at Grinnell in the late ’80s. I did not know this would lead to a career but it did.” Koth is executive director of the Center for Community Engagement at Seattle University.
Palgrave-Macmillan has published Pope Francis and Interreligious Dialogue: Religious Thinkers Engage with Recent Papal Initiatives (2018), co-edited by Harold Kasimow, George Drake Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, and the Rev. Alan Race, author of the classic text in the theology of religions titled Christians and Religious Pluralism (1983). On Aug. 29, Kasimow and Race presented Pope Francis with aplaque of the cover of the book.
Beginning with the personal foreword by Rabbi Abraham Skorka, a close friend of Pope Francis, and followed by a selection of the pope’s writings, the book consists of 12 essays by men and women from many parts of the world. The contributors write from the perspectives of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Humanism. Each author elaborates on how Pope Francis’s openness to dialogue and invitation to practical collaboration on global concerns — particularly ecological sustainability and worldwide poverty — represents a significant and hope-filled achievement.
Why do some people bounce back after a devastating loss, where as others succumb to despair? If the unimaginable happened to you, how would you cope? As a mother who has experienced the loss of a disabled child, the memoir Searching for Spenser (Anamcara Press, 2018) by Margaret Rayburn Kramar ’72 offers guidance, wisdom and inspiration. Many memoirs about deceased children drip with sentimentality, but due to Kramar’s background as a journalist and the time that has elapsed since her child’s death, she has been able to chronicle Spenser’s birth, life, and death with objectivity, yet emotional power. It not only speaks to those who have children with disabilities and those who have lost a child, but also to those who seek an amazing and surprising journey about redemption and hope.
Since the 1940s, researchers have been repeating claims about autistic people’s limited ability to understand language, to partake in imaginative play, and to generate the complex theory of mind necessary to appreciate literature. Ralph James Savarese, professor of English, challenges this view in See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Duke University Press, 2018). Over a period of years, Savarese has discussed fictional works with readers from across the autism spectrum and was stunned by their ability to expand his understanding of texts he knew intimately. Mixing memoir with current research in autism and cognitive literary studies, he celebrates how literature springs to life through the contrasting responses of unique individuals, while helping people both on and off the spectrum to engage more richly with the world.
Published by Duke University Press (2018), A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History: Ten Design Principles is a guide for novice teachers as well as experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their courses. Authors Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks ’73 and Urmi Engineer Willoughby draw readers into the process of strategically designing courses that will enable students to analyze gender and sexuality in history, whether their students are new to this process or hold powerful and personal commitments to the issues it raises. Wiesner-Hanks is professor of history and women’s and gender studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
The fourth edition of Woe Is I, a grammar and usage guide by Patricia T. O’Conner ’71, will be published in February 2019 by Riverhead Books. Woe Is I was a national bestseller when it first appeared in 1996, and it now has more than half a million copies in print. O’Conner has also written four other books on language and writing: Words Fail Me, Woe Is I Jr., and, with her husband Stewart Kellerman, You Send Me and Origins of the Specious.
She has also written the introduction for a new edition of Robert Graves’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder. The new edition, published by Seven Stories Press in January 2018, restores the original 1943 text of the landmark book on prose style that Graves wrote with Alan Hodge.
