Alum Authors 2025
The 2025 Alum Authors event is scheduled for Saturday, May 31 at 3:00 pm in Park Science.
Book by attending authors are listed below.
Sammie and Pumpkin
by Alanna Albano '05
Janie is so excited to meet her new dog, Sammie! They have lots of fun going on walks and exploring, but when Janie takes Sammie to the dog park to play, she discovers that Sammie is resistant to meeting new friends. Sammie hides and barks at everyone, scaring away the other dogs. Can Janie help Sammie learn how to be a friend? Even though it seems impossible, an unexpected visitor on Janie's doorstep might just be able to help.
This is an inspiring and heartwarming story about how the value of family and the power of friendship have the unique ability to bring out the best in ourselves and others.
Bad Animal
by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer '20
Bad Animal is a collection of poems about the body, about violence, about safety, a meditation on love, sex, and death. It explores the body's changing relationship to desire in the aftermath of incredible sexual trauma, and how we societally reconcile the beauty of the world we live in with intense emotional pain. Bad Animal is a collection of poems that remind the reader we are all made of flesh and bone and while flesh is temporary and fragile, bone is hard and resilient: both are needed to be whole. Nature is present throughout these poems which echoes the real world-a world that needs both vulture and carcass, a world that needs both dark and light.
***
Oh, Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer's Bad Animal is a marvelously macabre and bewitching book! Here is a poet who plunges headlong into haunting intersections of faith, nature, sex, and violence, evoking for us the allures and the horrors of death, enlivening the body and stirring up questions about the future. Conjuring a world where Danger sometimes wears the face of Pleasure, and vice versa, these poems unfold a menagerie of incisive, visceral images you won't soon forget. Bratt-Pfotenhauer's language glows and pulses like an ember in the dark.
Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
Bad Animal is fierce, smart, knows language as a kind of mating dance with the reader, a lever into the interior, and a demon possession. It's aware of its body as text and texture, a source of hurt and a source of rapture. It has a hawk heart and a crow mind. Bad Animalis memorable for its avidity, its "renegade" desire, its scholarship of "little violences". It puts you under a spell. It gallops inside you.
Bruce Smith, author of Devotions
It's a miracle for a poetry collection to wind up so smart and so moving at once. I read Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer's Bad Animal in one gulp, then reopened it and started over, for it rewards study. Brave new offering to the literary world, and the first of many books I'll buy from this astonishing young poet. Buy this book!
Mary Karr, author of Tropic of Squalor and The Liar's Club
Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer's Bad Animal subtly questions the contours of comfort throughout the inevitable cycles of life-beginnings, endings, death, pain, love. This book is at once a soothing lyrical balm with the sonic authority of a bomb. Read it and experience the power of a deftly written and precisely conceived work of art.
Airea D. Matthews, author of Simulacra & Bread and Circus
Culture, Nature, and the Other in Caribbean Literature: An Ecocritical Approach
by Mary Ann Gosser Esquilín '80
Stereotypes of Caribbean "nature" as lush and its people as exotic Others abound. For those who call the islands home, the region evokes more somber images that reflect the history of colonization and the environmental devastation that ensues. Close ecocritical readings of literary texts illuminate aspects of an encompassing nature inclusive of all Others within the Caribbean ecosphere.
This book thus uses ecocritical lenses to examine Caribbean texts and provides a useful context to understand how Other(ed) natures have been scripted by bringing to light environmental concerns not patent in heteropatriarchal interpretations. It establishes patterns of coexistence and interdependence between the spiritual and palpable material worlds that surround the characters who populate Caribbean literature. Culture, Nature, and the Other in Caribbean Literature: An Ecocritical Approach considers texts from colonial times to the present that reflect on the significance of the region's rich cultures against the brutal slavery system and its impact on the environment. Christopher Columbus's first letter helps establish the effects of colonization on indigenous peoples, the ensuing importation of African slaves, and the changes to the landscape. The Haitian revolution, a turning point in Caribbean history, remains central when studying the effects of continued violence on the ecosystem when juxtaposed to the spiritual world of Other(ed) natures. The expression of female agency and sexuality provides the framework for the study of adaptation and hybridization as crucial reflections on the ecological significance of the Caribbean's multiracial reality.
The book considers the Caribbean's rich cultural matter as part of the ecosphere that resonates with the surrounding more-than-human world that should be saved from extinction. Novelists transform ecological issues into pressing matters that extend beyond the environment and include the syncretic cultures of the islands and its peoples. No other book offers this kind of close comparative re-readings of Caribbean texts-from Hispaniola to Haiti to Cuba, and from Martinique to Guadeloupe to Puerto Rico, to the Dominican Republic-through ecocritical lenses to recognize the significance of the survival of the literary matter of Other(ed) natures as readers (re)think their own roles within this inclusive ecosphere. Culture, Nature, and the Other in Caribbean Literature is a valuable resource for academic researchers, students, and general readers interested in ecocritical approaches to Caribbean literature as well as environmental and cultural studies.
This book is in the Cambria Latin American Literatures and Cultures Series headed by Román de la Campa, the Edwin B. and Lenore R. Williams Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania.
How Healers Heal
by Julia Huber '85
Did you know the adult obesity rate is 41.9% and the child obesity rate is 19.7% in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)? Did you know that obesity-related diseases can be reversible and treatable without medications? Did you know that healthcare professionals (HCP) are more likely to experience burnout than any other profession, according to the CDC? Have you heard of Lifestyle Medicine and how it can be a solution for burnout? Do you wonder how people turn their lives around and how you can do the same?
Then keep reading . . .
In this book, you'll discover:
- Six pillars of health and tips on how to achieve them.
- An evidence-based approach to everything your mother told you to do.
- Stories of struggle and positivity in overcoming health challenges.
- How Lifestyle Medicine (LM) can be the cure for HCP burnout.
- How LM board certification can help healthcare professionals change their lives and the lives of patients.
- And much more!
In this book, you'll read deeply personal stories from 33 board-certified Lifestyle Medicine physicians about how they are changing their lives and the lives of their patients using the six pillars of health with Lifestyle Medicine. You'll discover narratives about these physicians' life-changing events like chest pain, infertility, loss of loved ones, COVID, immune deficiency, alopecia, burnout, and much more, along with how the events were catalysts for their health transformations.
Rising rates of obesity and their related metabolic illnesses of diabetes, hypertension, stroke, dementia, and autoimmune disease are on the rise in the United States right when physician burnout is at an all-time record high. Lifestyle Medicine could be the perfect catalyst for change in a failing healthcare system. A movement of physicians is bringing back the focus to lifestyle medicine and prevention, and it has already proven to improve the lives of these physicians and their countless patients.
If you're ready to be inspired, scroll up and click "add to cart" now!
Shell Games
by Bonnie Kistler '75
"A truly spectacular psychological thriller with a dazzling mystery at its core. Shell Games is the ultimate one-sitting read that has everything--incredible family dynamics, characters that burst off the page and a premise so deliciously enticing and surprising that the pages quite simply turn themselves. Bonnie Kistler is a genius!"--Matthew Blake, author of Anna O
A brilliant page-turning thriller about a young woman whose fabulously wealthy mother might be the victim of an elaborate con or might be losing her mind--and the daughter can't tell where the truth lies.
Julie's mother Kate is a force of nature--a glamorous woman of seventy, a self-made real estate developer, a grande dame in Florida society, and a power broker in Florida politics. It wasn't easy for Julie to grow up in the shadow of such a dynamo, but she loves her mother, and she and her husband Eric are thrilled when Kate marries her long-lost high school sweetheart, a salt-of-the-earth man named Charlie.
But their storybook romance ends abruptly. On their wedding night, Kate calls the police in hysterics to report that Charlie just confessed to a notorious unsolved crime from decades before.
Charlie says she imagined it. Eric says that Kate has dementia. And the FBI says that Charlie couldn't possibly have committed that crime.
Julie doesn't know what to believe. Is her brilliant mother losing her mind? Or is sweet, lovable Charlie gaslighting Kate to gain control of her fortune?
As Julie tries to navigate through this maze of paranoia and mind games, cracks start to develop in her own marriage as it seems that Eric is keeping secrets . . .
Set against a backdrop of rampant development and devastating climate change, Shell Games is a psychological thriller that will make your head spin and the pages turn as you wonder exactly who is doing what to whom.
Forensic Archaeology: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
by Kimberlee Moran '00
This book presents the multidisciplinary field of forensic archaeology as complementary but distinct from forensic anthropology. By looking beyond basic excavation methods and skeletal analyses, this book presents the theoretical foundations of forensic archaeology, novel contexts and applications, and demonstrative case studies from practitioners active in the field. Many of the chapters present new approaches and methods not previously covered in other forensic archaeology books, some of which may be of direct use to those conducting criminal investigations.
Carrying All Before Her
by Chelsea Phillips BMC '05
The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women (Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan) to demonstrate that pregnancy affected celebrity identity, impacted audience reception and interpretation of performance, changed company repertory and altered company hierarchy, influenced the development and performance of new plays, and had substantial economic consequences for both women and the companies for which they worked. Deepening the fields of celebrity, theatre, and women's studies, as well as social and medical histories, Phillips reveals an untapped history whose relevance and impact persists today.
Falling Through the New World
by Cynthia Reeves '80
"An absorbing story of ordinary people trying to find their way." Kirkus Reviews
"Reeves' prose is nothing short of mesmerizing. Her attention to emotive detail and her ability to paint vivid, poetic imagery through dialogue is remarkable." Literary Titan
"Reeves has produced a powerful set of interlocked vignettes that shine with a sense of place, purpose, and connection...." D. Donovan, Senior Book Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
There are so many ways to measure time, to wish ahead and to dream backwards. Here, with grace and deep, echoing wisdom, Cynthia Reeves yields the generations of an Italian family. Loss follows yearning. Love yields to regret. Distances are traversed, reversed, and finally emptied. The only seams in this lustrous novel-in-stories are those that come at the noble hands of an unforgettable tailor who dares to leave Italy behind to stake a bold claim in hope.
-Beth Kephart, My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera
Cynthia Reeves' expertly crafted novel-in-stories finds artistry in manual labor and reveals the sacred in the everyday. Twists of lace ribbon, a tailor's steady stitching, thread looped into intricate patterns to make a wedding or mourning veil, a string of rosary beads, notches in a wooden tabletop marking time and human presence: Reeves uses these heirlooms and artifacts to seamlessly bind generations of an Italian-American family, old country to new, past to present. Falling Through the New World is a deeply moving story of the Desiderio family-a history in handwork that is the truest expression of faith in the future.
-Elizabeth Mosier, Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home
Spanning three generations and two continents, the richly textured stories of Falling Through the New World explore the costs and promise of emigration from rural Italy to urban America. With meticulous and moving detail, Reeves depicts characters struggling to reconcile the beauty of their parents' customs and faith with their increasing irrelevance in the modern world. Members of the Italian-American diaspora and anyone who has sought a similar reconciliation with the past will find in this collection a voice of wisdom and compassion.
-Laura Bonazzoli, author of Consecration Pond: A Novel in Stories
Bakhtin suggests that the novel has no formal form, that instead it is voracious in its nature, digesting other form, inventing newer ones. That's what novels do, and that is what Cynthia Reeves in her new novel, Falling Through the New World, does: Effortlessly, it seems, she performs in this collection the Bakhtinian two-step, the Janus glancing glance that looks forward and back at the same time. This new new novel creates a unique physics of form, contains and expels its own unique dimensions of gravity. Its dynamic construction connects galaxies, star by exploding star, and shows you microscopic sadness in a handful of dust. This novel takes its place next to the likes of Love Medicine, A Year of Silence, and Winesburg, Ohio, but it also opens its own place and space, its own amorous apothecary, its own very vocal and evocative kind of silence and slice of time.
-Michael Martone, Author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone
Last Whaler
by Cynthia Reeves '80
THE LAST WHALER is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive under extreme conditions. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to rendezvous with the ship meant to carry them back to their home in southern Norway. Beyond enduring the Arctic winter's twenty-four-hour night, the couple must cope with the dangers of polar bears, violent storms, and bitter cold as well as Astrid's unexpected pregnancy. THE LAST WHALER concerns the impact of humans on pristine environments, the isolation of mental illness, the sustenance of religious faith, and the solace of storytelling.
Never Simple: A Daughter's True Story of a Mother's Made-Up Life
by Liz Scheier '00
This gripping and darkly funny memoir "is a testament to the undeniable, indestructible love between a mother and a daughter" (Isaac Mizrahi).
Liz Scheier's mother was a news junkie, a hilarious storyteller, a fast-talking charmer you couldn't look away from, a single mother whose devotion crossed the line into obsession, and--when in the grips of the mental illness that plagued her--a masterful liar. On an otherwise uneventful afternoon when Scheier was eighteen, her mother sauntered into the room and dropped two bombshells. First, that she had been married for most of the previous two decades to a man Liz had never heard of and, second, that the man she had claimed was Liz's dead father was entirely fictional. She'd made him up--his name, the stories, everything. Those big lies were the start, but not the end; it had taken dozens of smaller lies to support them, and by the time she was done she had built a fairy-tale, half-true life for the two of them. Judith Scheier's charm was more than matched by her eccentricity, and Liz had always known there was something wrong in their home. After all, other mothers didn't raise a child single-handedly with no visible source of income, or hide their children behind fake Social Security numbers, or host giant parties in a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment only to throw raging tantrums when the door closed behind the guests. Now, decades later, armed with clues to her father's identity--and as her mother's worsening dementia reveals truths she never intended to share--Liz attempts to uncover the real answers to the mysteries underpinning her childhood. Trying to construct a "normal" life out of decidedly abnormal roots, she navigates her own circuitous path to adulthood: a bizarre breakup, an unexpected romance, and the birth of her son and daughter. Along the way, Liz wrestles with questions of what we owe our parents even when they fail us, and of how to share her mother's hilarity, limitless love, and creativity with children--without passing down the trauma of her mental illness. Never Simple is the story of enduring the legacy of a hard-to-love parent with compassion, humor, and, ultimately, self-preservation.