Spring 2019

In this Issue

For students whose parents didn’t complete a four-year college degree, getting into Grinnell is just the first hurdle. Figuring out how to survive, much less thrive, is a whole series of hurdles. And it’s less a sprint over a brightly lit track than a marathon through a dark tunnel with blind...
When she was an expectant mom, Monique Hagan knew the risks that she faced: African-American women are twice as likely to experience pregnancies that result in early delivery, low birth weight, or even infant death, according to National Vital Statistics.
In his previous life as a professor of Russian history, Marshall Poe ’84 enjoyed reading as many scholarly works as he had time and inclination to digest.
Hearing from the Student Alumni Council (SAC) is always a highlight of both our fall and spring Alumni Council meetings; the students’ ideas, enthusiasm, programs, and organizational abilities are inspiring. SAC became an organization on campus in 2013, emerging from an earlier organization, the...
  1. You’ll need a computer with a broadband Internet connection, a decent microphone, a set of earphones, and a reasonably quiet place to record.

Grinnellians in the New Books Network catalog include current, past, and retired professors Andrew Hsieh, who was interviewed (along with co-author Sherman Cochran) about The Lius of Shanghai (Harvard University Press, 2013); Scott Cook, who chatted...

As a young copywriter at a New York City ad agency, Ken Krimstein ’80 had a routine. Each Wednesday he would walk to the offices of The New Yorker, drop off a batch of his cartoons, and hope that the editor would like one enough to publish it. Ten years and 400 cartoons later, his first one was...

Next time you’re challenged to a sword fight, call Ricki G. Ravitts ’70, a fight director who has taught stage actors around the world how to parry, thrust, and stab for almost 25 years.

When Brian Cavanagh-Strong ’09 landed himself in the New York University Tisch School of the Arts graduate program for musical theatre writing, it was, he says, “like a dream.”

Ali Wade Benjamin ’92 writes, “Wore my Grinnell T-shirt for a hike up Koko Head on Oahu, Hawaii, on Nov. 16. As I put it on, I wondered if I’d meet any Grinnellians. Sure enough, when I got to the top, Brian Ross ’82 recognized the shirt. He was hiking with his...