An excerpt from the article “Young Reflects on Stephen Hawking’s Influence, UNC’s Connections” by Katie Bowler Young (poetry, ’07) posted at UNC Global:

Young Reflects on Stephen Hawking’s Influence, UNC’s Connections

In August 2015, I had a stage manager’s dream role, pulling back a curtain and cuing Stephen Hawking to take the stage. We were at the Waterfront Congress Center in Stockholm, Sweden, where he was to deliver a public lecture, “Quantum Black Holes,” to an audience of more than 3,000 people after being introduced by UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Carol Folt.

Like Professor Hawking, I was in Stockholm for an academic gathering co-sponsored by Carolina, along with the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics (Nordita), an institute co-hosted by KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University; the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge; and The Julian Swinger Foundation. The conference was organized through the efforts of Professor Laura Mersini-Houghton, cosmologist and theoretical physicist in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, and her some of her close scientist colleagues.

We were together in Stockholm for a week for the Hawking Radiation Conference, where scientists were grappling with what most of us consider to be inexplicable rules of the universe, a science well outside the boundaries of my experience and knowledge. I had come to be a part of it all through my role as Director of Global Relations for UNC Global, an external relations role with roots in my work as a writer. How a career in writing extended to external relations is a separate matter, but what is important to me about it is the influence that Professor Hawking had on who I am as a writer. Truly, at the core of my love for language, I think of myself as a poet, and in Professor Hawking’s words and being I saw endless metaphors, symbolism and a light I typically associate with literary greatness. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the poem “Return” from Rest, the new book by Margaree Little (poetry, ’12),

RETURN

It’s June, the last Saturday in June, when Wendy and I go back again to
search the wash.

In April a doctor found another jaw there, and another jaw means another
person.

Don’t think, thousands crossing every year, hundreds dying, which they are,
don’t think, this is never ending.

There’s a job to do, there’s a plan, there’s one man found by us, his bones
the sheriff left behind: we’ll bring the rest of his body back, and if there’s
another, bring that, too.

We park, walk up by the barbed wire fence and at the gate turn into the
valley, toward the first ridge, the trees brown and low around us, the high
crops of rock rising up after the steep downward walk, the dip between
them where we’ll cross into the second valley.

An excerpt from “Inflatable Jesus Might Save Us All” by Emily SInclair (fiction, ’14) published at The Museum of Americana:

Inflatable Jesus Might Save Us All

One of my first jobs, as a college student in the mid-nineteen eighties, was selling soap at a Crabtree & Evelyn store on New York’s Upper West Side. Across the US, the chain, then less than twenty years old, sold botanically-based soaps, lotions, oils, and powders, all in pretty boxes and containers meant to convey the pleasures of an English garden. By stepping inside one of Crabtree & Evelyn’s cottage-style stores, customers could imagine they’d exchanged familiar malls and streets for another time and place: an Americanized fantasy of Victorian English life, lavender-scented, sheep-filled, and in some inchoate way, better. For some, there is nothing more American than a wish to seem faintly European.

My Crabtree & Evelyn, on Columbus Avenue, was owned by a guy named David, a tall, thin nervous man of about fifty. David was something of a tyrant, sitting in his back office clutching his head as he went over the numbers. As a gesture of goodwill, he regularly employed teenage boys who’d just been released from juvenile hall, and they gazed at us with hope and sullenness as they carried boxes up the steep stairs from the basement to our street-level store. We were not permitted in the basement; the boys were not allowed to linger in the store.

Periodically, David emerged from his office to yell at us about the way we arranged things, about carelessly leaving open boxes on the floor while we stocked the shelves with new inventory. For David, the boxes disrupted the narrative that our products were crafted in some nearby pasture, brought in by horse and carriage.

The store manager was a former opera singer named Ethlouise. She was probably in her forties, a black woman with a creamy voice and a calm demeanor. She wore elegant suits with silk shirts and pearls, as if she were hosting a tea. She, more than anyone, was the person who best embodied the Crabtree & Evelyn brand. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the article, “Poetry as a Mirror,” by Glenis Redmond (poetry, ’11) in Teachers and Writers Magazine:

Poetry as a Mirror

Poetry has given me a mirror in which to reflect upon myself as a Black girl turning into a Black woman. The first poem in which I saw my reflection happened when I was eleven years old. I was a fifth-grade student at Aviano Elementary in Ms. Vann’s class in Aviano, Italy–we were an Air Force family stationed overseas. On one uneventful day in February, the teachers rounded up all of us elementary students and walked us over to the high school gymnasium for a Black history program. Assemblies in my eleven-year-old mind were cool because we missed class, but assembly in lieu of recess was not so cool. However, little did I know that I would not miss my favorite playground game that day, Prison Ball–little did I know that my small world was about to be magnified.

I am sure that I was well mannered and respectful during the program, because that was how I was raised. Yet it was not until Yolanda Walker, a tenth-grade girl, took the stage that I became fully engaged. I became rapt before a word ever fell from her mouth. I noted how cool Yolanda was–dressed in all black and sporting an Angela Davis afro. Her clothes, her swagger, and her sense of agency took me in. Then she recited a poem, “1,968 Winters” by Jackie Earley. Her performance blew my fifth-grade mind. It was not just the poem, but how she conveyed the poem with a full-bodied delivery. The essence of the poem came alive with Yolanda’s gestures, stance, and attitude.

The poem she read evoked laughter with its colloquial speech and repetition of black black black, then white. On the surface it could have been mistaken for just a funny poem. I laughed along with everyone else, but the turn in the poem got me. When the speaker walks out into the white snow after arming herself with black feelings, black music, and black thoughts, I wasn’t laughing anymore. I saw myself in a piece of literature for the first time. This poem instructed: If you live in a world that does not embrace or accept you, you will feel emotionally cold. I got it. The poem demonstrated how I felt in my young life to date. Up to then, I had never seen myself reflected accurately in a textbook or any other literature. I liked my teachers, but they were not culturally competent.  […continue reading here]

An excerpt from “Skating Through An Uncertain World” by Emily Shoff (fiction, ’16) from The New York Times:

Skating Through An Uncertain World

Telluride, Colo. — The snow came late to Telluride this year.

Until a week ago, our normal 70-inch base stood at a paltry 30 inches and amber waves of grass rippled on south-facing slopes, already ready for the summer elk.

Usually, there are a dozen ski runs curving into town; at the beginning of February, there was only one, an icy chute coated with a thin veneer of fabricated snow. Our mountain hamlet was quiet, too quiet, everyone panting for tourists and the crisp green bills they set down upon our quaint streets, paved off the backs of gold miners.

The average annual snowfall is 300 inches. This season we’ve had 99 inches so far, with more than two feet of that falling in just a week. We welcomed it with the joy of parched desert-dwellers greeting the rain. […continue reading here]