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 Animal is 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
Mary Karr, author of Tropic of Squalor and The Liar's Club
Airea D. Matthews, author of Simulacra & Bread and Circus
100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World
by Barbara Vinick '65
100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World features stories of Jewish brides from six continents, highlighting diverse customs and rituals related to weddings now and in the past. The stories, written by brides, their relatives, clergy, and other intimates, cover similarities and differences across the Jewish diaspora, from courtship and betrothal to pre-wedding customs, the wedding ceremony, and beyond.
With stories from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, this collection of intimate personal testimonies will surprise and inspire. A Jewish wedding after conversion in Madagascar, a reunion of Holocaust survivors in Sweden, a shipboard romance initiated by a celebrity, these stories from 83 countries describe Jewish wedding traditions, some familiar and others eye-opening, in a multitude of cultures and settings, past and present.
100 Jewish Brides offers intimate glimpses into the worlds of brides and their families based on their own written accounts. It represents opportunities to learn how Jewish lives were and are currently lived around the world from memories of the distant past to recent times.
Last Whaler
by Cynthia Reeves '80
In the late 1930s, Tor, a seasoned beluga whaler, and his wife Astrid, a trained botanist, venture to a remote Arctic whaling station. Stranded by unforeseen ice conditions, they face a harrowing winter where the twenty-four-hour darkness is only one of their challenges. As they struggle against violent storms, brutal cold, and the threat of polar bears, Astrid discovers she is pregnant, adding another layer of complexity to their already strained marriage.
The Last Whaler is more than a survival story; it's a meditation on grief, guilt, and the human impact on pristine environments. Can Tor and Astrid find redemption amidst the desolation, or will the Arctic's harsh beauty claim them both? Perfect for readers seeking atmospheric historical fiction with a touch of suspense.
Next Economy MBA: Redesigning Business for the Benefit of All Life
by Phoenix Soleil '95
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.
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
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.Countess of Secrets: The Ladies of Almack's Omnibus No.1
by Marissa Doyle '85
Young widow Annabel Chalfont, Countess of Fellbridge, has two small sons to raise, a mountain of her late husband's debts to pay off, and a secret: she's a shadow-shaper, able to manipulate shadow as anyone else might clay. She and six other high-born ladies with equally extraordinary abilities defend England against supernatural crime-but the world knows them only as the Lady Patronesses of Almack's, Regency London's most exclusive social venue.
This volume contains the first three installments of The Ladies of Almack's series:
The Forgery Furore: Who is forging vouchers to Almack's...in Annabel's name?
The Vanishing Volume: When book fandom in Regency London is foiled by magic, the Ladies come to the rescue.
Lyrics and Larceny: Annabel's cousin is in love, and London's jewels are being spirited away...might there be a connection?
Marquis of Secrets: The Ladies of Almack's Omnibus No. 2
by Marissa Doyle '85
Young widow Annabel Chalfont, Countess of Fellbridge, has two small sons to raise, a mountain of her late husband's debts to pay off, and a secret: she's a shadow-shaper, able to manipulate shadow as anyone else might clay. She and six other high-born ladies with equally extraordinary abilities defend England against supernatural crime-but the world knows them only as the Lady Patronesses of Almack's, Regency London's most exclusive social venue.
This volume includes the fourth, fifth, and sixth installments of The Ladies of Almack's series:
The Cursed Canvases: Who is magically vandalizing the pictures at the Royal Exhibition? When art becomes artillery, the Ladies take notice.
Turmoil on the Thames: When the King's birthday celebration at Eton is crashed by uninvited guests who threaten to eat the students, it's a good thing that the Ladies of Almack's are at hand...
An Event at Epsom: A horse is a horse, of course-or is it? Annabel and the Ladies must attend the races at Epsom to investigate a very unusual steed.