Please send us news of your accomplishments and of major events in your life. Send photos! Let us know about your friends who are also alumni! We look forward to hearing from you.

Contact Sophia Canavos <scanavos@buffalo.edu> to have information posted on this website.

Margaret Konkol (PhD 2015) co-edited a collection of essays with Julia Daniel called Modernism in the Green: Public Greens in Modern Literature & Culture (Routledge 2020). It includes a chapter by Allison Siehnel (PhD 2018) on Central Park and racial erasure in antebellum New York.  https://bit.ly/PublicGreen 

Rachelle Toarmino (BA 2012), known in Buffalo for her work as the founding editor in chief of Peach Mag, recently published her first book-length poetry collection That Ex with Big Lucks Books. Excerpts of That Ex have appeared or are forthcoming in P-QUEUE, Cosmonauts Avenue, Shabby Doll House, Sundress Publications, and elsewhere. All news related to the book, including readings, interviews, reviews, and more, can be found at Rachelle's website: rachelletoarmino.com/that-ex. In additional news, Rachelle will be an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Amherst in the fall.

Matthew Pieknik (MA 2011) In May 2018, Matt received his Master of Social Work (MSW) from New York University, and in June he will commence practicing privately in Manhattan. He provides psychotherapy and psychoanalysis to adults across the lifespan, as well to couples, and focuses on issues related to gender, sexuality, love and relationships, trauma recovery, addiction, and aging. He is also pursuing post-graduate training in Lacanian psychoanalysis. He lives in Hell's Kitchen with his partner, Jeanpier, and their schnauzer, Lilly. 

Jill Twist (MA 2009) is now the Assistant Proposals Coordinator at Ecology and Environment, Inc located in Lancaster, NY. Normal responsibilities include writing, editing and compiling information for client proposals. These proposals detail services to be offered by Ecology and Environment, Inc. such as environmental characterization statements and hazardous waste site remediation. In addition to building and sustaining a LEED-Platinum certified building, Ecology and Environment, Inc. provides an on-site nature trail, a carpool program and a 300-foot long atrium with skylight and over 1,000 indoor plants.

Anna Reckin (PhD 2008) recently published her first book-length poetry collection entitled Three Reds with Shearsman Press. Her poetry was published in Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets, and an essay entitled “Milk and Thistles” was published in the book In Their Own Words: Contemporary Poets on their Poetry. In addition to artist residencies that took her to places like Portugal and Cambridge, England, Anna currently has a grant from Arts Council England to work on her second poetry collection.

Kyle Schlesinger has just published What You Will, a book of poems, with 202 Press (it used to be called NewLights). This is a letterpress edition of 100 books, all signed by Kyle. You can view images of the book here: http://newlightspress.blogspot.com/2011/11/what-you-will.html and you can read extensive documentation about the making of the book here: http://newlightspress.blogspot.com/search/label/What%20You%20Will

George Zornick (BA 2006) has been doing research and production work for “The Media Project,” a documentary-style show about journalism that began its second season Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 11 p.m on the Independent Film Channel. The first episode of the new season dealt with international news, with pieces on the U.S. media’s coverage of the recent conflict in Georgia, the availability (or lack thereof) of al-Jazeera English in the United States, and coverage of the “pirates” in Somalia. Future episodes include pieces on how the media explains “clean coal,” the moral and journalistic issues behind the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoe at President Bush, how the White House press corps functions, and on the current economics of the news business.

Below are some video clips about the show and a couple of reviews. Great work, George!

Season 2 promo (video)
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=157692395590&ref=mf

Only 2 cities in the US broadcast Al Jazeera English. Should we allow all Americans to watch? (video)
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=188189065590&ref=mf

When an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at George Bush, the Western media mostly missed the point. Was it an act of violence? A political act? An act of journalism? We investigate. (video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRYkV7zW_00

Timothy Altieri (BA 2004) started as an Assistant State Attorney (Prosecutor) of the 20th Judicial Circuit in Florida, and now, he works as an attorney for one of the largest law firms in the state: Cole, Scott & Kissane, P.A. Timothy is licensed to practice law in New York and Florida, where he resides with his fiancée in Naples.

Richard Deming (PhD 2003) was awarded the 2012 John P. Birkelund Berlin Prize in the Humanities from the American Academy in Berlin.

Josh Lukin (PhD 2003) recently published *It Walks in Beauty: The Select Prose of Chandler Davis* (Aqueduct Press). The volume contains four essays, five stories, two letters, a speech, and an interview by the great civil libertarian and peace activist and Red Scare survivor and mathematician Chandler Davis as well as three explanatory essays by Josh. The volume can be purchased online at http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/ItWalksInBeauty.html

Peter Ramos (PhD 2003) published Poetic Encounters in the Americas.  https://www.routledge.com/Poetic-Encounters-in-the-Americas-Remarkable-Bridge-1st-Edition/Ramos/p/book/9780367367015

Peter is an Associate Professor of English at Buffalo State University.

Geoff Nason (BA 2003) graduated with a joint English/Communication degree in 2003 and is now assistant online editor at The Buffalo News. He deals with daily placement of stories on BuffaloNews.com as well as works with reporters in utilizing technology to provide readers with an expanded multimedia experience.

Erin Shultz, (BA 2003) graduated from UB English in 2003, and is the Life & Style editor at the Kokomo (Ind.) Tribune.

Evan Gottlieb (PhD 2002) is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Oregon State University. In 2007 he published Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707-1832 with Bucknell University Press.

Charlotte Pressler (PhD 2002) teaches at South Florida Community College where she specializes in English and philosophy, and directs the Honors and service-learning programs. True to her commitment to both pedagogy and civic engagement, she has been participating in an oral history pilot project spearheaded by the Historical Society of Avon Park: “Decades of Change: Black and White Residents of Avon Park Recall Their Memories of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s.” Very little oral history has been documented from the rural South during this period, so the focus on Avon Park, a very small town in rural, citrus-and-cattle South Florida, offers a new and important perspective. Charlotte has also been helping to run a service-learning project that sends Honors students in science, technology, engineering, and math down to the Highlands County Agricultural Extension, where the University of Florida is running a research program on biofuels crops. She received a grant from Florida Campus Compact to organize a day-long meeting on biofuels, the economy, solar panels, and green jobs, and she is active in state and regional professional associations. Charlotte is also the proud owner of a “historic” Craftsman bungalow dating to about 1924 that she is slowly rehabilitating, and she grows citrus, figs, and pomegranates in her backyard.

Ben Cady (BA 2001) is enrolled in NYU Law School. He has found that studying English at UB was good preparation for the study of law, and he has many fond memories of the Spectrum and the great professors and students in the English Department. This past summer, he worked for the Justice Department’s Environmental Enforcement Section in Washington. Now he is enrolled in the Immigrant Rights Clinic and a staff editor on the Review of Law and Social Change.

Catherine Gray (PhD 2001) is the author of Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain(Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).  She teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Candace Brill Lombart (BA, MA, & PhD 2002), was commissioned by the Independent (UK) to write a brief obituary on American poet Ruth Stone. www.independent.co.uk  Select "Obituaries," click "Ruth Stone: Poet who chronicled her love and loss."  Published December 3, 2011.

Edward Comentale (PhD 1999) published Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-garde(Cambridge University Press, 2004) and is now teaching at Indiana University.

Yunte Huang (PhD 1999) was a student at Beijing University in the late 1980s. After the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, he determined to leave China. After getting his PhD at UB, he spent four years teaching literature at Harvard before taking a position at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he now holds the rank of Professor. Huang’s novel Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendez-vous with American History was released by W. W. Norton on August 12, 2010 and has been widely acclaimed. Yunte Huang is also the author of Transpacific Imaginations (2008) and Transpacific Displacement (2002), and he is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. On November 5th, 2010, he gave a talk at the Albright-Knox on his new novel.

Julie Husband (PhD 1999) has just published her second book, “Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth Century American Literature:  Incendiary Pictures” with Palgrave Macmillan. The book examines the impact of antislavery narratives and icons on emerging conceptions of wage labor during the antebellum era.  More on the book can be found at http://us.macmillan.com/antislaverydiscourseandnineteenthcenturyamericanliterature. Julie and her partner, Jim O’Loughlin (PhD 1998), live in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and work in the Department of English at the University of Northern Iowa.

Rachel Sparacio-Foster won 2nd place in the Business-to-Business (B2B) Rising Star copywriting competition. American Writers & Artists Inc. (AWAI) sponsored the competition as part of their “Breaking into the B2B Copywriting Market” workshop. The workshop attracted over 250 copywriters from throughout the world.  “Rachel’s submission was selected as a finalist for this competition because she applied the principles from the workshop very effectively with fresh, clear copy,” said Denise Ford, AWAI Conference and Events Director. Rachel earned a BA in English from UB in 1999 and received the Arthur Axelrod Memorial Prize in Poetry in 1998. She currently lives in Toronto and launched Fresh Perspective Copywriting to provide freelance copywriting services for B2B technology companies and non-profit organizations. For additional information or to arrange an interview, contact Rachel Sparacio-Foster at (647) 342-4921 or visit www.freshperspectivewriting.com.

Natalie Grinnell (PhD 1997) has been appointed to the Reeves Family Endowed Professorship in the Humanities at Wofford College.

Deborah Silverman (PhD 1996) is an assistant professor of communication at Buffalo State College, where she teaches public relations and media writing courses and is faculty advisor to the Public Relations Student Society of America chapter. She is currently serving on the national board of directors of the Public Relations Society of America, the first person elected to the board from Buffalo. In August 2009, she was honored by the Public Relations Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication for her conference presentations on ethics to public relations students and practitioners.

Juliana Spahr (PhD 1996) is close to completing a book on the literature of the 1990s. A scholarly and creative writer, she is also publishing "Well Then There Now" with Black Sparrow Press. With David Buuck, she is writing a book that tells the story of Demented Panda and Koki, two friends who are writers in a time of war and ecological collapse. Last year, her book of poems This Connection of Everyone with Lungs was translated into Norwegian Nynorsk. With UB colleague Jena Osman (PhD 1998), Juliana still co-edits ChainLinks, the latest incarnation of Chain, the journal they started while graduate students. Their most recent book is Genocide in the Neighborhood, a translation of a number of primary texts about the escrache movement in Argentina. Their next book will be "A Megaphone," the bulk of which consists of some 75 responses collected over the last two years from writers around the globe in response to some questions about feminism and writing. Juliana writes, "Last summer, I co-organized with Joshua Clover the group hug that was the 95 Cent Skool, a week-long seminar in poetry and its relationship to struggle. We are inviting people to join us in the Durruti Free Skool project for summer of 2011."

Victor Verney (PhD 1996) will soon publish a book titled "Warrior of God: Jan Ziska and the Hussite Revolution." The publisher is Greenhill Books.

Keith McShea (BA 1995) is now an editor in the Sports Department at the Buffalo News and was recently honored by the national Associated Press Sports Editors organization for his coverage of the 2007 Daytona 500. His story ranked among the top 10 game stories in the 100,000-250,000 daily circulation classification:
http://apse.dallasnews.com/contest/2007/writing/writing.100-250.html

Bansari Mitra (PhD 1995) presented papers to the William Morris Society, at the 2007 Chicago MLA convention and to the American Folklore Society, at the 2006 Philadelphia MLA convention.

Michelle Burnham (PhD 1994) has published Folded Selves:  Colonial New England Writing in the World System (University Press of New England, 2007).  She teaches at Santa Clara University.

Sean Patrick Hill (BA 1994) writes with an update on his recent activities: “This month my first full-length book of poetry, The Imagined Field, is being published by Paper Kite Press. Poems in it have appeared in a number of print and online publications. I graduated with an MA in Writing from Portland State University in Oregon. I’m currently teaching in Kentucky. Several poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best New Poets. The book, by the way, is currently available for pre-order from the website above. I have begun to schedule readings, as well. I also have a blog with links to many publications, including poems, book reviews, and travel articles. I have also written a hiking guide for Oregon to be published by Avalon Press this spring, as well: Moon Outdoors Oregon Hiking.

Denise M. Juron-Borgese (BA Architecture 1993, BA English 1994, MA U of Pennsylvania 1997) is a licensed architect in New York State and a LEED Accredited Professional with a specialty in Building Design and Construction. After about a dozen years of practicing architecture in Philadelphia and Washington D.C., Denise returned to her hometown region of Western New York. She is a Development Project Manager with Ciminelli Real Estate Corportation, working on diverse development initiatives. Her current projects include the Bethune Lofts at Buffalo Meter Company, which was the former home of UB’s Architecture and Arts Departments. She serves as President of the Buffalo Architecture Foundation, a member of the Board of the Buffalo/WNY Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Interior Design Department at Buffalo State College. She currently resides with her husband, UB alumnus Antonio Borgese (M. Arch, 1994) and their two sons.

Ted Pelton (PhD 1992) moved to Wisconsin to take a sabbatical replacement job at Ripon College and then a tenure track position at Lakeland College in Sheboygan, WI. But after winning an NEA Fellowship in Fiction and starting work on his first novel, Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals), he quit his job at Lakeland and moved back to Buffalo in an effort to live cheaply and finish the novel.  He began teaching at Medaille College of Buffalo, where he is now a tenured Full Professor and the Chair of the Humanities Department. Three more books have followed: a novella, Bhang; a collection of short stories, Endorsed by Jack Chapeau, now in an expanded second edition; and another novella, Bartleby, the Sportscaster.  Of these, the most significant was Endorsed by Jack Chapeau, which was the first book published by the small press Ted founded in 2000, Starcherone (“start your own”) Books. Ted began Starcherone to publish his first collection of short stories, but after Raymond Federman offered the press the opportunity to reprint Federman’s The Voice in the Closet, Starcherone expanded and became a nonprofit corporation in 2003. Starcherone has now published two dozen titles.  The most successful of these was Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey which, after being nominated for the prestigious Young Lions Prize for debut fiction by the New York Public Library, was sold to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, allowing Starcherone to pay off its initial operating loss. Mason’s book was reviewed glowingly in the New York Times and elsewhere and is considered one of the top American debuts in recent years. Starcherone is considered one of the top publishers in the US for innovative and experimental fiction, and will have 10th anniversary celebrations in the coming months at the Center for Fiction in New York City and at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Washington, DC, in February 2011. Ted’s own writing career has also had success. In 2006, Buffalo Spree magazine awarded him Best Fiction Writer in its annual Best of WNY issue, and in 2008, Ted won an Isherwood Fellowship. Ted married UB English Assistant Professor Susan Muchshima Moynihan in May, 2008, and their daughter, Sophia Boonyen Pelton, was born in July, 2009. You can see more of what he’s up to by visiting his writing website, tedpelton.com, or the press website, starcherone.com, or by looking him up on Facebook.

Scott Slawinski (BA 1992), currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, recently published his second book, Emily Hamilton and Other Writings, a collected edition of the works of New England novelist and poet Sukey Vickery (1779-1821).  Vickery’s Emily Hamilton (1803) provides a decided constrast to Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Hannah Foster’s The Coquette; the book’s three main characters deftly navigate the marriage market, and the novel’s resident rake is no match for the book’s titular character.For more details, check out  the University of Nebraska Press’ web site for their entry on Scott’s book: http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Emily-Hamilton-and-Other-Writings,674130.aspx. Scott’s first book, Validating Bachelorhood: Audience, Patriarchy, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Editorship of the Monthly Magazine and American Review, was published by Routledge in 2005).  For more information about Scott’s professional activities, check out his website: http://www.wmich.edu/english/facultyandstaff/profiles/slawinski.htm

Jennifer Wozniak (BA 1992) says of her time in the English department: "I am very passionate about the education that I received at UB- especially my English degree. It has been a secret weapon throughout my career and has brought me much success." This success has included receiving an MBA in 1996 from UB’s School of Management, becoming a risk portfolio manager and assistant vice president of M&T Bank, and being elected President of the UB Alumni Association in 2003. She began the Denver, CO chapter of the Alumni Association today.

Frank Emmett (MA 1991) recently received his PhD in History from Lancaster University, England.

Chris Sicks (BA 1990) will publish his first book, Tangible: Making God Known through Deeds of Mercy and Words of Truth, this September with NavPress. You can find a description of the book here: http://www.navpress.com/product/9781612914411/Tangible-Chris-Sicks. Chris serves as Pastor of Mercy at Alexandria Presbyterian Church in Virginia. For the past 20 years, he has worked to make God’s love tangible to refugees, homeless men, addicts, and needy children in the Washington, DC area. He is a graduate of Reformed Theological Seminary, a member of the Christian Community Development Association and Evangelicals for Social Action, and often teaches on mercy ministry principles and refugee resettlement. Also a journalist, he has written more than 1,000 articles and columns. He and his wife Sara have three fantastic children.

James Morrison (PhD 1988) published a collection of short stories in 2009, Said and Done (Dzanc Books/Black Lawrence Press), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a winner of a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in short fiction.  His collection can be found at http://www.dzancbooks.org/store/BLP/morrison-said.html. He was recently promoted to Full Professor of Literature and Film Studies at Claremont McKenna College, and also teaches in the Intercollegiate Media Studies Program of the Claremont Colleges consortium and the graduate program of the Claremont Graduate University.

Susan Bachmann (PhD 1984, BA 1971) teaches English full-time at El Camino College in the Los Angeles area. She has co-authored (with Melinda Barth) a college composition textbook, Between Worlds: A Reader, Rhetoric, and Handbook, 7th ed., published by Pearson: http://www.mypearsonstore.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0205251269, and she generously gave a copy of this edition to the English Department for its use! Sue will always be indebted to Leslie Fiedler, who directed her PhD dissertation and deepened her love of visionary literature, Shakespeare, and Faulkner. She is also grateful for her teaching experiences as a graduate TA in the English Department from '75-'77 and for her undergraduate writing experiences as an editor of The Spectrum  from '68-'71, a vital time to be covering events at UB.

Sharon J. McPeters (MA 1983) is a writer, painter and musician who has just finished writing a novel, and signed off on it with one of her pen names, "Scapegoat McPeters." The novel centers on a female character and is set, like most of Mcpeters' work, in her home state of California. She has been continually homesick for 30 years and has, she states, "by now, no doubt, idealized the landscape." At the completion of this novel, she decided to return to her first loves, short stories and poetry.

David Matlin (PhD 1981) read for Buffalo's Exhibit X series on October 10, 2012. His most recent book, A Halfman Dreaming, is the second book in a trilogy that began with his first book, How the Night is Divided, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. David's other published works include Prisons: Inside the New America: From Vernooykill Creek to Abu Ghraib, which is based partly on Matlin's ten-year experience teaching in the prison system of New York. David is currently a professor of English and the MFA Creative Writing program at San Diego State University.

Ansie Baird (MA 1980): In April 2010, Ansie was recognized by the UB Poetry Collection with Three Poems, a publication honoring poets living in Buffalo. In 2008, her book In Advance of All Parting (2009) won the White Pine Press poetry competition. Ansie edits Earth's Daughters literary magazine, the longest running women’s publication in the country; the Earth's Daughters Collection of manuscripts, letters, and ephemeral materials is held in the UB Poetry Collection. This summer, she was a Poet in Residence at the Chautauqua Institution, where she conducted a five day poetry workshop, gave a public reading and a lecture.

Since 2006, Randi Minetor has written 25 books for The Globe Pequot Press on travel–most on the national parks. The "Passport To Your National Parks Companion Guides" series provides the locations of every Passport cancellation stamp in the national park system. Her most recent books (released this fall) include "Washington, DC: A Guided Tour Through History"; "Gettysburg: A Guided Tour Through History"; "Everglades National Park Pocket Guide" and Gulf Islands National Seashore Pocket Guide.” In addition, Randi written four books in the "Best Easy Day Hikes" series, on Rochester (now in stores), Buffalo, Syracuse and Albany (all releasing in May 2010). For more info, visit her author page on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Randi-Minetor/e/B001JSBNEO/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1

Rick Coughlin (BA 1978) is Vice President of Security Credit Systems, Inc. in Buffalo, New York with direct responsibility for business technology decisions, systems development, and computer operations. During the personal computer revolution of the 80's, Rick was able to leverage the skills he developed at UB in the role of technical manager for Keane Inc., a Fortune 500consulting firm. “Without the benefit of formal IT training, it was my ability to serve as a ‘middleman’ between technical specialists and customers that set me apart” Rick conveyed. "Communication, documentation, proposal writing, and interpreting requirements are a major part of a consulting engagement. Writing lesson plans as a student teacher helped me to be focused and effective in learning on my own." Rick founded Peak Technologies ‘Engineered Software and Documentation’ in 1990. Before it was sold to a German company in 2002, Peak Technologies developed software for many local organizations including Bank of America, the City of Buffalo, National Fuel Gas, and The Tanning Bed.

Judith Kerman (MA 1973 & PhD 1977) was awarded the 2008 Earl L. Warrick Award for Excellence in Research from Saginaw Valley State University.  The award is given annually to an SVSU faculty member who has made a significant and/or longstanding contribution to the advancement of knowledge in a recognized field of scholarship or artistic endeavor. Kerman is a professor of English at SVSU; a poet, artist, and musician, and owner of Mayapple Press, a small press in Bay City that publishes primarily poetry.

Deborah Meadows’ (BA 1977) latest collection of poems, Thin Gloves, was published (Green Integer, 2006). She teaches at California Polytechnic State University, in Pomona.

Amy Dunkin (BA 1976) editor-in-chief of The Spectrum in 1975-76, is now director of academic operations at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.

Elliot Krieger: "UB English is and was the greatest English department in the country! I was lucky enough to be a graduate student at UB English in the heyday, 1970-74. After graduating, I taught English at UMass-Boston for several years, then worked as a reporter and editor at the Providence (R.I.) Journal. Now, I work for the R.I. Department of Education. Last year, Soho Press (N.Y.) published my first novel,Exiles. It’s set in Sweden in 1970, among American war resisters. Readers will notice that some of the back story takes place in an unnamed university that will remind them of SUNY Buffalo. Friends may remember that UB-English allowed me to spend my second semester of grad school on leave as an exchange student in Uppsala, Sweden–obviously the formative experience that led to Exiles. I don’t know why it took me so long to write this story. Emotion recollected in senility? I hope my friends at and from UB-English might read and enjoy Exiles!"

Paul Watsky (PhD 1974) has just published his debut poetry collection, Telling the Difference, with Fisher King Press. After five years teaching English at San Francisco State in the 1970s, Paul switched fields to clinical psychology, and now works as a Jungian analyst in San Francisco.

Frank E. Dobson (BA 1973) got his PhD in English from Bowling Green University in 1985 and is currently Director of the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center at Vanderbilt University. His new novel, Rendered Invisible (Plainview Press, 2010) is a work of historical fiction which takes readers inside 1980′s Buffalo and Western New York during the reign of terror of the .22-Cailber Killer. This racially-motivated killing spree polarized a city and a region but has received little attention since then. Rendered Invisible seeks to change that. During his ucoming book tour, Dobson will be returning back home, to Buffalo.

Neil Baldwin (PhD 1973) is Professor of Theatre and Dance at Montclair State University, where he is Director of The Creative Research Center www.montclair.edu/creativeresearch. After three decades of publishing biography and nonfiction in the analog world, his first novel, The 25th Protocol, has been published on Amazon Kindle.

Susan Breslow (BA 1972) completed a Master’s degree in Journalism at Ohio State and since 1997 has been a travel writer/editor with About.com, a part of The New York Times Company. She is a member of the Society of American Travel Writers and published ‘Destination Weddings For Dummies’ in 2007.

New York Times best-selling author Virginia DeBerry (BA 1972) published her seventh novel with her co-author and best friend Donna Grant. Uptown: A Novel was published March 2, 2010 by Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster. http://books.simonandschuster.com/Uptown/Virginia-DeBerry/9781439137765

Linda Hanley Finigan (BA 1970) editor-in-chief of The Spectrum in 1969-70, has just published her first novel, LOVE AND WAR. From a star-struck young girl’s handshake with JFK during the 1960 campaign through the battlefields of Vietnam and the student protests at home, LOVE AND WAR encompasses an era whose politics and passions continue to resonate in our own: the story of war and its aftermath when the warriors come home. Linda Hanley Finigan served as a Congressional aide to Arizona Democrat Morris K. Udall in Washington, as a press spokesman for the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice and as a nightly newscaster for Chapel Hill’s PBS affiliate WUNC-TV. She is the author of numerous short stories, two other novels and is currently at work on a fourth. More information on the book can be found at the publisher’s website: www.cobalthouse.com or the novel’s: www.loveandwarstories.com.

Susan Bosnick Rakow (BA 1970) The Second edition of her book EDUCATING GIFTED STUDENTS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL: A PRACTICAL GUIDE was published in June 2011 by Prufrock Press. In February 2011, she earned tenure as a Clinical Associate Professor at Cleveland State University where she teaches courses in the College of Education and Human Services in middle school and gifted education and directs the Graduate Program in Gifted Education.

Jayne Lyn Stahl published her first book of poems, Riding With Destiny, with NYQ Books. http://nyqbooks.org/title/ridingwithdestiny.

Sandra Donaldson, (BA 1968), Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor at the University of North Dakota, is one of the world’s top scholars of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She recently attended the London launch of her latest book, a 5-volume Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. There had not been a complete scholarly edition of this influential author’s works for over a century. Sandra also recently unearthed a previously unknown manuscript of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese” in a manuscript notebook that had been in private hands since 1915. No other draft of any of the sonnets has previously come to light, which makes this the discovery of the earliest known manuscript of the sonnet sequence. “Sonnets from the Portuguese” was composed by Barrett Browning during her courtship with Robert Browning, which began in January 1845 with a letter from him and resulted in their marriage in September 1846. Sandra is also the co-editor (with Philip Kelley) of a collection of letters from Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to a friend while they lived in Florence during the period of the Italian struggle for independence in the late 1840s and 50s: The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning to Isa Blagden 1850–1861 (Wedgestone Press, 2009).

Frederick Feirstein (BA 1960), may be the first poet to graduate from UB, and remains a poet, playwright, and psychoanalyst. He has published eight books of poems with his ninth, Dark Energy, set for release in January 2013 as the first book in The Grolier Series of Established Poets. Fred’s many awards in poetry include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s John Masefield Award, and the Quarterly Review of Litearautre’s international prize for his books Family History and Ending the Twentieth Century. His first published work, Survivors, was named one of two Outstanding Books of the Year by the American Library Association. Of his twelve or so theater productions, his musical drama The Children’s Revolt won a Rockefeller OADR Award and starred Willem Dafoe. Masquerade, his second musical drama, won the Audrey Wood playwriting prize and was staged in Chicago with a Broadway cast in 2000 by ARTCO. Fred also has a book of case studies in psychoanalysis entitled The Man in the BMW.