Alum Authors 2024

"This is not just 'outside-the-box' thinking. This is 'set the box on fire, throw it over a cliff, and start inventing entirely new shapes' thinking."

In Solve, Not Serve: What Other Nonprofit Management Books Won't Tell You, author Kelly E. Griffin proposes a long-overdue paradigm shift within the social sector. Her insights are gleaned from decades of experience as a nonprofit strategist and advisor, extensive research and analysis, and perspectives from dozens of inspirational and effective nonprofit leaders, funders, and independent thinkers.

With piercing honesty and charming wit, Griffin offers compelling ideas and strategies that provide viable solutions for solving the biggest problems our society faces today.

This guidebook will motivate employees, volunteers, and financial supporters of the nonprofit sector to:

• Define clear priorities
• Develop sustainable leadership
• Make brave decisions
• Stand up to unreasonable funder expectations
• Apply only the most relevant practices from for-profit business

Solve, Not Serve will empower and inspire you if, like Griffin, you are dedicated to making the world a better place.

Bringing together 12 original essays, Shaping the American Interior maps out, for the first time, the development and definition of the field of interiors in the United States in the period from 1870 until 1960. Its interdisciplinary approach encompasses a broad range of people, contexts, and practices, revealing the design of the interior as a collaborative modern enterprise comprising art, design, manufacture, commerce, and identity construction. Rooted in the expansion of mass production and consumption in the last years of the nineteenth century, new and diverse structures came to define the field and provide formal and informal contexts for design work. Intertwined with, but distinct from, architecture and merchandising, interiors encompassed a diffuse range of individuals, institutions, and organizations engaged in the definition of identity, the development of expertise, and the promotion of consumption. This volume investigates the fluid pre-history of the American profession of interior design, charting attempts to commoditize taste, shape modern conceptions of gender and professionalism, define expertise and authority through principles and standards, marry art with industry and commerce, and shape mass culture in the United States.

Winner of 2022 Sappho's Prize in Poetry

Late Epistle is a rare first book, one that radiates all the pleasures of poetry-sound, form, and figurative language, among others-but also one that evidences a life transformed by discovery. Read and marvel at Anne Myles's prowess, then read again to be forever changed by her vulnerability and depth of feeling. This "dark and lustrous" book permits entry into the "not-yet-known" with miraculous clarity.
-Natasha Sajé, author of The Future Will Call You Something Else

A sensual imagination informs these poems with startling images and line turns that astonish. I love the childhood narratives, the family sadnesses and secrets revealed, the tender, wise observations. Formally inventive, the poems that showcase a woman-loving-woman anchor the speaker in a story of self-invention and a sustainable life.
-Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me

Muriel Rukeyser asks, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?" In this candid, emphatically visceral collection, Anne Myles speaks her truth with unflinching ardency, astonishing the reader with poems that are both masterfully crafted and strikingly forthright. Reading this book, I experienced the pure delight of a strongly female voice claiming its identity and purpose.
-Martha Silano, author of Gravity Assist

In Late Epistle, Anne Myles has given us a thoughtful and moving account of her journey to become a poet, singing in a voice (Athena-like, sprung fully formed) that is lyrical and tender, honest and unsparing. In poems of family, loss, love, grief, and the ongoing quest to find and express the true self, the deep intelligence of the work shines through in evocative imagery, lovely language, and subtle yet effective uses of form.
-Moira Egan, author of Amore e morte

Who's the real boss of a story? The writer or the characters who live to tell the tale? Or both together?

Follow the three little pigs as they argue with the writer over what kind of story to tell. Will the hero become the villain? Find out in this fun introduction to the essential components all great stories need.