English

It’s not every day that a city names a day after a children’s book author. But Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto declared December 8, 2019, Kate Dopirak Day as her fellow writers came together to hold a children’s book festival in her honor.

Kate’s Kid Book Bash, held inside the Ace Hotel in Pittsburgh, was a bittersweet celebration of the late author. The event was filled with authors, books, creativity, and plenty of kids — all the things Kate Pohl Dopirak ’98 held dear. “To use her words, Kate would be ‘over-the-moon-excited’ to have an event like this dedicated to her,” said her brother Joe Pohl.

He sat behind a table decorated with twinkling lights, selling the rhyming books his sister had published — Snuggle Bunny, You’re My Boo and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Car. A rising star in the children’s book world, Kate had signed a deal for her fourth book, but the young author died at age 43 of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a rare degenerative disease, in October 2018. Though she will never see it in print, Hurry Up: A Book about Slowing Down is scheduled for release this spring (2020).

Famous Pittsburgh writers such as Jonathan Auxier (Sweep, The Night Gardener) and Sharon Flake (The Skin I’m In) participated to honor the author with the radiant smile and rhyming prose. Twenty-five authors and illustrators participated. Many had known Kate as a friend and encouraging mentor through her leadership role in the Society of Children’s Book Authors and Illustrators.

“It was awesome participation from the children’s lit community,” said Kate’s husband, Josh Dopirak, also a 1998 Allegheny graduate. The event benefited Reading is Fundamental, one of Kate’s favorite charities where a fund was established in her name.

“Writing is not an easy life. There is a lot of rejection and disappointment,” said Betsy Fitzpatrick, co-organizer of the event and a writer-friend of Kate. “Kate mentored other writers and helped them through the process. Everyone loved her for her bubbly personality, but she was one of the best critical thinkers I’ve ever met. She made a difference to everyone she met either by the impact she had on your work or how she made she feel as a person.”

Kate developed some of those critical thinking skills at Allegheny College, where she studied English and education. She found inspiration in a creative writing class she took there, said her husband, Josh. She was both a serious student and very social, making many friends in her sorority of Kappa Kappa Gamma and elsewhere on campus.

“She had this most infectious smile and great laugh. There was just something about her spirit that would draw people in,” said Beth Cuneo Dopirak, her roommate at Allegheny. “She loved the tight-knit community of Allegheny.” After Kate began dating Josh her senior year, she introduced Beth to his brother, Ryan, knowing he would be the perfect match for her. The best friends would become sisters-in-law after college.

After graduation, Kate became an elementary school teacher in Hampton School District. She then started writing poems and short stories in Highlights magazine and slice-of-life columns for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

But the path to getting published as a picture-book writer took years. She ignored the common advice that agents and editors give writers: Don’t do rhyming verse. One of the hardest things to do well, rhyming stories often come out forced. “But Kate was true to herself,” Fitzpatrick said. “She liked rhyme and it was her strong suit. She stuck with it thankfully because now the world has her books.”

She would write every day, and also read to her two boys, Joey and Bobby, daily.

Kate was so dedicated to her craft that she would file her rejection letters from agents and editors in a binder, absorbing the feedback and making changes. “She would get frustrated at times but she would just go forward,” Josh said.

When Kate finally broke into the children’s book market, it happened swiftly. She signed with an agent at Adams Literary, and just three weeks later, she landed a deal with Scholastic for Snuggle Bunny, which was published in 2016. “She was surprised and ecstatic,” Josh said.

Then came more rejection. “She went through three years when she didn’t sell anything,” Josh said. “What was important was that the children’s writing community was supportive and encouraging.”

That support went two ways. As her star rose as she published You’re My Boo and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Car, she mentored other writers.

Kelly Riehl Conroy ’98 met Kate during her first year at Allegheny and became closer with her after graduation as she sought advice about writing. The two bonded as Kate critiqued her work and celebrated all of her small victories along the way. Conroy, in turn, helped Kate do book launch parties.

“Katie taught me that to be a better writer, you have to tap into the weirdest, most embarrassing parts of you to find your unique stories and voice,” Conroy said. “She was always sophisticated, poised, and cool. I assumed my goofiness and immaturity made us a bad friend match, but I was wrong. She not only liked but celebrated the weirdness in me. She turned my insecurities into my strengths and helped me be more ‘me.’ She didn’t love people despite their bumps and bruises, she loved people because of them.”

The day after Kate’s Kid Book Bash, Conroy got an offer from an agent and is now represented.

“She was my cheerleader and my teacher,” Conroy said. “She really took me under my wing. She was always building everyone else up.”

In an era of email and texts, Kate sent handwritten notes to writers, encouraging them on their road to publishing. Fitzpatrick once got a card with a big sun on it, telling her how proud Kate was of all the hard work she was putting into a middle-grade novel that was still very much a work in progress. “Who does that?” Fitzpatrick said. “It was very Kate.”

Beth Dopirak also got notes from her former college roommate and sister-in-law. Beth and other sorority sisters participated in Strides for CJD, a walk/run fundraiser, in Pittsburgh in 2019. They formed a team called “Kappas for Katie.”

Those who couldn’t make the walk donated to the team. “Everyone in their own way tried to honor Kate,” Beth said. “She was so beloved.”

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Karl Smith has a doctorate in biophysics from the University of Rochester. He also worked at Amazon as a software engineer trying to make the Alexa voice assistant smarter. But now Smith is putting his talents to better use, he says, as a children’s science storyteller. He describes his new calling as “Mister Rogers meets Bill Nye.”

Smith calls his alter ego Doctor Sparks. “Hoo boy,” he says, “there’s a story behind that. It’s not a short story though. Let me just say that I earned the name Sparks, and I earned it on a lonesome walk through the New Mexican high desert that lasted for three sleepless days.”

Smith, a 2011 Allegheny graduate, lives in the Pittsburgh area and does most of his 50-minute shows at elementary and middle schools. But he also has appeared at events such as the World Scout Jamboree 2019 and at institutions like the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh and the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

Smith also delivered a TEDx talk when he was making national news as a graduate student in Rochester writing short stories about people’s lives for 10 cents each on a vintage typewriter.

After finishing his doctorate, he spent some time developing a murder mystery smartphone app and putting together a proposed television pilot, in which he started his Doctor Sparks persona. “The basic idea was to use my typewriter-stories project as a way to teach science concepts,” Smith says.

That’s when he got the Amazon job offer. “I moved to the West Coast, became a professional software developer, took up surfing, and in my free time began to put together the live science storytelling show I now tour with,” says Smith.

A little more than a year later, he moved back to Pittsburgh with his fiancee to become a professional storyteller.

“While I was at Allegheny, I spent my summers working as a historical interpreter at a Boy Scout ranch in the Sangre de Christo Mountains of New Mexico,” Smith says. “Every night in front of a campfire, I would tell stories about what it was like to be a logger in the year 1914, and it’s there that storytelling took hold of me.”

So now Smith travels extensively, spreading scientific knowledge to youngsters as Doctor Sparks. Most of the presentations are in the Pittsburgh area; he toured Rochester and upstate New York schools in November, and in February 2020 he will tour Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Charlotte, North Carolina. He brings a number of props, including “smart” hula hoops, pogo sticks, juggling balls, teddy bears and inflating robotic muffin hats.

The science concepts he teaches include thermodynamics — particularly what heat actually is and how a hot air balloon works, motion and energy, illumination, and fractions, among other things. “Generally I pick a particular next generation science standard or common core curriculum idea, and find a way to spin a story around the concept,” he says. You can find out more about the show here.

Allegheny Professor of English Benjamin Slote recalls Smith sitting in class a decade ago “with a little smile on his face—teachers can tell pretty quickly who is lit from within by their interests and delights in the material. Karl was so lit. His love of stories and storytelling quickly surfaced, as did the related power of imagining the lives of others.”

Slote was Smith’s advisor when Smith worked summers in the New Mexico camp as a storyteller. “He sent me long and wonderfully written reflections about the experience,” Slote recalls. “That’s when his love and performative energies for storytelling were confirmed for me. And that lit-from-within interest in the world and all the world’s quirks has never left him, and I suspect never will. Kids know it when they see it. Which is why storytelling and good teaching are very close cousins.”

It’s not surprising that Smith has focused his storytelling on science, says Allegheny Professor of Physics Doros Petasis.

“Karl’s physics/English double major gave him a breadth of knowledge and experience that he now uses to communicate science to children and inspire them to become future scientists. As a double major, he only did a one-semester senior project in my lab but accomplished more than most students do in a whole year,” Petasis says. “As part of his project, he designed, constructed and tested water-cooled Helmholtz modulation coils for a unique electron spin resonance spectrometer based in a research collaborator’s lab at Carnegie Mellon University. These Helmholtz coils allow us to increase the strength of weak signals we get from metalloprotein samples and are still in use today, many years after Karl constructed them.”

So Smith is on a mission to become the next nationally famous “science guy.”

“The best part about storytelling is when everything sings,” says Smith. “The crowd is with you, you’ve won them over. They can’t wait to see what you’re going to do next. If you do your job right, you can give them a sense that stories are capable of doing more and being more than they would ever have imagined. Anyone can make a crowd laugh, or make them feel fear or anger. But with the right story told the right way, you can make them feel wonder, and that is a special thing.”

Smith says he has had his embarrassing moments on stage, such as dropping and breaking his WiFi-enabled and sensor-studded juggling balls on occasion.

His best moment so far involved a new story he had never told before an audience and it included the audience chanting “Dinosaur, Dinosaur” over and over, says Smith. “I started the story, and the crowd was so into it that they almost threw me off. They chanted so loud they filled the whole gymnasium with sound and it was perfect. Then at the end when the dinosaur eats all the children in the story the audience all shrieked and screamed, and I knew at that moment that I had made the right decision to leave a lucrative and successful career at Amazon to go and tell stories to children.”

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Allegheny College’s faculty helped Lauren Ottaviani ’18 nurture her knack for learning languages, for Shakespearean studies and for singing. Now they are celebrating Ottaviani’s Fulbright award to teach English in Belgium starting in the spring of 2020.

“Lauren will make an ideal Fulbright Scholar. Prodigiously bright, mature and responsible, she graduated summa cum laude from Allegheny in only three years, earning the English Department prize for best senior project and chairing the student Honor Committee at a time it undertook a review of its policies and practices,” says Jim Bulman, Henry B. and Patricia Bush Tippie Professor of English at Allegheny.

Ottaviani will be placed at the University of Antwerp, where she will teach and assist with English literature courses. “In addition to designing lessons for students, I will also be taking a course on Flemish to better understand the local language and culture,” says Ottaviani, who is from Zelienople, Pennsylvania.

She is currently in Great Britain attending Durham University, where she is pursuing a master’s degree in English literature. “I will be completing a dissertation on the formation of collective memory and its impact on female identity in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy and will be presenting my research at a medieval memory conference at the University of Basel this summer. I will move to Antwerp upon completing my degree in the fall,” says Ottaviani.

While at Allegheny, Ottaviani was involved with the choral program and was a member of the College Choir and Chamber Choir. She also participated in Opera Scenes and took voice lessons with Carol Niblock. She was on the Honor Committee and served as co-chair.

“In comparing my experiences as an undergraduate to those of my course-mates at Durham, I realized how much I benefited from the extended attention which Allegheny professors give to their students,” says Ottaviani, who was an English major and French studies minor at Allegheny. “The Allegheny English Department provided me with invaluable skills for my continued study of literature — both in my courses and during their office hours, my professors pushed me to deepen my analyses and sharpen my writing skills.”

Ottaviani says she enjoys being overseas. “A highlight of my Allegheny experience was my participation in choir, which helped me so much to grow both as a singer and as a person. My first trip abroad was with the Chamber Choir on our tour to New Zealand in 2017 — it’s fair to say that my interest in traveling internationally began with the Chamber Choir and the remarkable cultural insights we had together on tour,” she says.

“She clearly ranks among the top 10 students of the more than 4,000 I have taught during my 40 years,” says Professor Bulman.

Ottaviani is one of about 2,100 U.S. citizens who will study, conduct research and teach abroad for the 2019–2020 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, as well as their record of service and leadership potential in their respective fields.

The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program and is designed to build lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The Fulbright Program is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Editor’s Note: Allegheny College junior Joseph Merante is spending the spring 2019 semester at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. He shared his thoughts on life there so far:

The first thing that hits you when you step out of the airplane on the eastern edge of the Australian continent is the heat. My experience might have been intensified, since my first step onto the tarmac was in daylight. I had one more plane to board once I got to Australia, and I had to wade through a thick curtain of heat hovering above the asphalt to get there. I’ve been to California, places like Palm Springs, and the weather there is hot and balmy. The airport in Brisbane is hot full stop.

The good thing about all this heat, though, is that Australians don’t mess around when it comes to air conditioning. Each room has its own Aircon unit that lowers 10 degrees Fahrenheit in 10 minutes. And, of course, you get used to it. At this point, when it’s 70 degrees in my room, I’m shivering in my pajamas.

What’s bad about all this heat are tropical flowers and fruit plants. What comes from them, I mean. Sunlight is everywhere, which means foliage is everywhere. And if foliage and fruit are everywhere, that means flies are everywhere. And if flies are everywhere, that means things that eat flies are everywhere. The food chain here is quite bottom heavy. Unlike in the United States, where you have mountain lions and moose and bears, the biggest terrestrial predator is an emu, if that even counts. Dingoes, I guess, are next. There are tons of lizards, frogs, snakes, birds and bats. They are having a pest problem with the frogs; drivers will swerve out of their way to try to run them over. It’s the same with bats, they try to expel colonies only to move them to the next town over.

What’s good about all this heat are the beaches. The water is warm, the sand is soft, the seagulls are disrespectful — everything you’re looking for from a beach experience. The coast nearest to Townsville, called the Strand, has the unique situation of being penned in by an island and the Great Barrier Reef. Although that’s not good for surfing, the lack of angry waves means it’s perfect for nice and relaxing dips into the ocean. Right now it’s jellyfish season, so we are warned against choosing your own locations to swim, but there are plenty of netted areas that are dragged in the morning that are open to the public. There is also a place known as the rock pool, which is a large stone basin that filters in seawater each week that you can swim within, if the nets aren’t enough. Each of the beaches has a stand where a container of vinegar is placed. Should you get stung, you are told to run to the vinegar and pour it on the wound.

In terms of culture shock, it’s much less of an adjustment than I was expecting. If someone’s popular, you can talk about how they went on “Oprah.” I’m studying the effect of trauma in one of my classes, we immediately went to clips of 9/11. The “What the Fox Says” video went viral here. People love Minecraft. People love the “Walking Dead,” and the “Walking Dead” video game. A lot of the music is familiar.

The water in restaurants is different, however. You don’t get the server hovering at your elbow filling up your glass whenever it’s empty (which is not good for me since I’m still sweating profusely). They do indeed say “G’day” and “mate.” They say “uni” and not college. They don’t have ketchup, they have tomato sauce, and they like beets (yay!) on a much greater variety of things.

While in Australia, I am taking two English classes, one about narrative theory, the other about different forms of biography. I am also taking a political science class that focuses on developing nations, charting the different methods and timelines for countries. My final class is called “Indigenous Australians,” which studies different native groups, including the Torres-Strait peoples.

My time at Allegheny has done a great job of teaching me to be self-sufficient, sensitive to other people’s values, and considerate of those who have different academic backgrounds, all of which has had a major impact on my experience here. I’m looking forward to coming home this summer, but in the meantime, I’m going to spend as much time at the beach as physically possible.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

If you think of the Middle Ages as little more than dirt, blood and Bubonic Plague, recent Allegheny College graduate Madeline Hernstrom-Hill can enlighten you.

“Sure, all that is there, but there is also so much more — complicated medical manuals, treatises about forms of government, astrological thought, trade across incredible distances, I could go on,” says Hernstrom-Hill, Allegheny Class of 2018.

And go on she will — to England, through a year-long Fulbright award to pursue a master’s degree in medieval history at the University of Leeds beginning this fall.

When she was 12, Hernstrom-Hill (at the prompting of her mother) read The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart. That work sparked her interest in the Arthurian Legends and medieval times.

“It’s such a vibrant time, from the gold inlay on illuminated manuscripts to the types of stories they told each other about knights and monsters and ladies, many of whom don’t match up at all to our modern notion of the medieval damsel,” Hernstrom-Hill says.

After arriving at Allegheny from her home in Boston, Hernstrom-Hill began to take courses in medieval history and literature with Jennifer Hellwarth, professor of English, and Stephen Lyons, retired professor of history.

Hernstrom-Hill credits Allegheny with teaching her how to conduct independent research and to ask the right questions about it. Even more, Hernstrom-Hill says she has learned to listen to the responses she gets — “to conduct a dialogue, whether between yourself and your subject material, or with another scholar, or with really anyone who has a different perspective than your own. I think that’s a hugely important skill for trying to get the most out of an international experience.”

Hernstrom-Hill will bring impressive academic credentials to her Fulbright experience. At Allegheny, she not only majored in both history and English but also completed two minors: classical studies and medieval and renaissance studies. Her senior comprehensive project explored medieval women from three different faiths during the Crusades.

Patrick Jackson, director of national fellowship advising in the Allegheny Gateway, notes that Hernstrom-Hill took full advantage of all the resources that the College offers as she pursued her interests. For example, she received funding to conduct summer research on campus and to attend a conference in her field hosted by Western Michigan University.

“Madeline did all of this not knowing that it would be the foundation for a successful Fulbright, but because she was interested in pursuing an idea that moved her,” Jackson says. “That’s the secret strength of a liberal arts education. By following our passions where they lead, we often wind up advancing not only our careers, but our lives.”

Hernstrom-Hill says she is grateful to her mentors at Allegheny, and she wants to follow in their footsteps and ultimately become a professor. Following her time in England, Hernstrom-Hill will begin the Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program at Northern Michigan University, where she has already been admitted. She hopes to go on eventually to earn a Ph.D.

For now, though, Hernstrom-Hill is focused on making the most of her Fulbright award and studying in England.

“I hope to meet other people who are totally in love with the Middle Ages,” she says. “There’s a wonderful community of medieval scholars out there, and a lot of them spend time at Leeds.”

And there’s another item she’d like to check off of her list:

“Also, I’d like to see a real castle!”

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Associate Professor of English and Director of Writing Alexis Hart and Senior Writing Consultant Jessica Reed ’18 presented their talk titled “De(ux)coding: (1) Collaborative Faculty-Undergraduate Research and (2) Questioning in ‘Matched’ Consultations” at the International Writing Centers Association Conference in Chicago on November 11.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Allegheny alumnus James Davis May and Chelsea Rathburn will read from their work as part of the College’s Single Voice Reading Series at 7 p.m. November 30 in the Tillotson Room of the Tippie Alumni Center. The event is free and open to the public.

May’s first book, “Unquiet Things,” was published in 2016. Other poems have appeared in Five Points, The Missouri Review, New England Review, New Ohio Review, New Republic, and The Southern Review. In 2013, he won the Collins Award from Birmingham Poetry Review, and has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Inprint, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar. May, who graduated from Allegheny in 2004, is a professor of English and creative writing at Young Harris College.

Chelsea Rathburn was raised in Florida before earning her master’s of fine arts at the University of Arkansas. Her first full-length collection, “The Shifting Line,” won the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award, and in 2009 she received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The Southern Review, New England Review, The Threepenny Review and Ploughshares. She is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Young Harris College.

For more information about the Single Voice Reading Series, contact Frederick F. Seely Professor of English Christopher Bakken at cbakken@allegheny.edu

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Allegheny alumnus James Davis May and Chelsea Rathburn will read from their work as part of the College’s Single Voice Reading Series at 7 p.m. November 30 in the Tillotson Room of the Tippie Alumni Center. The event is free and open to the public.

May’s first book, “Unquiet Things,” was published in 2016. Other poems have appeared in Five Points, The Missouri Review, New England Review, New Ohio Review, New Republic, and The Southern Review. In 2013, he won the Collins Award from Birmingham Poetry Review, and has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Inprint, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar. May, who graduated from Allegheny in 2004, is a professor of English and creative writing at Young Harris College.

Chelsea Rathburn was raised in Florida before earning her master’s of fine arts at the University of Arkansas. Her first full-length collection, “The Shifting Line,” won the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award, and in 2009 she received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The Southern Review, New England Review, The Threepenny Review and Ploughshares. She is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Young Harris College.

For more information about the Single Voice Reading Series, contact Frederick F. Seely Professor of English Christopher Bakken at cbakken@allegheny.edu

Source: Academics, Publications & Research

Assistant Professor of English John MacNeill Miller published an essay, “Composing Decomposition: ‘In Memoriam’ and the Ecocritical Undertaking” in a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts comprising select papers presented at this year’s meeting of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies association. The essay uses ‘In Memoriam,’ Alfred Tennyson’s poem about his best friend’s death, to examine how representations of decay affect our ability to think ecologically.

Source: Academics, Publications & Research