Alum Authors 2020
The 2020 Alumnae/i Authors was held virtually May 30. Books by participating authors that are available through your BMC Bookshop are featured below.
In addition to titles listed below, these BMC alum also participated in the celebration:
Olya Samilenko ’75 - Snow Goose Chronicles
Aida Waserstein '70 - My Name is Aida (English and bilingual editions)
Eleanor's Wars
by Ames Sheldon BMC '70
Hamilton Versus Wall Street
by Nancy Spannaus BMC ’65
Languages and Silence in the German-Polish Borderland
by Elizabeth R Vann BMC '85
Languages and Silence is an ethnography that focuses on a region of Silesia near Opole where the inhabitants speak three languages: Polish, German, and Silesian. The author spent several different extended periods of time living in a town that she calls Dobra, and she attempts to analyze the different ways that the inhabitants use the three languages and the situational, associational, political, and historical reasons they choose to speak whatever language they are speaking at any given moment.
Elizabeth R. Vann describes interpersonal situations in which a speaker uses specific words in one language or another for a particular purpose. Among the study's conclusions are that Silesian is associated with social familiarity and playfulness, while Polish is an expository register that makes a relatively intense, unidirectional claim on addressees' attention, and German is used as "a language of conflict."Additional dimensions of contrast have to do with speakers' "evaluations of cultural and temporal distance," with Silesian indicating cultural closeness (identity as well as indigeneity or archaism), Polish greater cultural distance (and fanciness), and German a farther extreme of otherness.
The author also argues that the analysis of this linguistic complexity can tell us a lot both about how individuals construct their ethnic and national identities, and how that construction is interwoven with psychology, politics, and history.
Irish Bride
by Sarah Woodbury BMC '90
August 1148. The wedding of Godfrid and Cait promises to be the event of the year, and even Gwen has made the journey across the Irish Sea to celebrate. Weddings can be moments around which tensions and resentments pivot, however, so when a monk turns up dead within moments of Gareth and Gwen's arrival in Ireland, the pair put on their sleuthing hats and get to work, racing to solve the mystery before it ruins Godfrid's big day.
Join Gareth & Gwen and their friends and companions for murder and mayhem in medieval Dublin in The Irish Bride, the 12th Gareth & Gwen Medieval Mystery.
Unbroken in Time
by Sarah Woodbury BMC '90
In 1282, David and his sister Anna crashed through time to save the life of their father, the last Prince of Wales. Thirteen years later, David is a grown man--husband, father, and High King of Britain. He is also the Duke of Aquitaine, a fact which King Philip of France appears to resent.
So when Philip summons David to Paris to bend the knee for the right to remain Aquitaine's duke, David is the first to suspect treachery. And when he learns Philip is taking advice from Guillaume de Nogaret, mastermind behind the annihilation of the Templars, the expulsion of the Jewish community from France, and the assassination of the pope, he's sure of it.
With not only Aquitaine on the line but all of Europe as well, David must call upon eight hundred years of history only he knows to ensure Avalon's past doesn't become Earth Two's future ...
Unbroken in Time will be followed by Outcasts in Time.
Complete Series reading order: Daughter of Time, Footsteps in Time, Winds of Time, Prince of Time, Crossroads in Time, Children of Time, Exiles in Time, Castaways in Time, Ashes of Time, Warden of Time, Guardians of Time, Masters of Time, Outpost in Time, Shades of Time, Champions of Time, Refuge in Time, Unbroken in Time, Outcasts in Time. Also, This Small Corner of Time: The After Cilmeri Series Companion.