Alumni News & Notes: Summer 2024
The New York City launch of This Is Not a Campaign. This is Wesleyan hosted 300 alumni and friends at City Vineyard May 2. Guests enjoyed a beautiful night with old friends and great music provided by The Solids (Carter Bays ’97, Pat Butler ’98, Rebecca Lichtenfeld ’97, Gaby Moss ’98, Josh Suniewick ’97, and Craig Thomas ’97). To see the full photo gallery and upcoming events, go to notacampaign.wesleyan.edu/join-us/.
Author and poet Maggie Nelson ’94 was recognized as a Top 10 Must-Read Modern Poet by Britannica. Nelson’s most beloved work, Bluets, is told through 240 prose poems that meditate on the color blue. Her genre-bending memoir, The Argonauts, received the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Nelson has also received fellowships from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Kennedy Odede ’12 has been recognized as one of the TIME100: Most Influential People of 2024. As founder and CEO of Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO), Odede has spent decades supporting impoverished communities across his home country of Kenya by implementing solutions that empower people to help themselves: schools for the most vulnerable girls, training programs for men to combat domestic violence, safe houses for survivors, community libraries, employment programs, innovative clean-water kiosks, and a community cooperative bank.
Tavia Nyong’o ’95 was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Theatre Arts & Performance Studies. Nyong’o researches Black queer cultural and performance studies, contemporary art and aesthetic theory, speculative genres, Afrofuturism, and Black sound studies. He is also studying critical negativity in the 21st century. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009), won the Errol Hill award for the best book in Black theater and performance studies. His second book, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018), won the Barnard Hewitt award for best book in theater and performance studies. He is currently the William Lampson Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, American Studies, and African American Studies at Yale University.
Hannah Dreier ’08 won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for her New York Times series focused on migrant labor across the United States and the corporate and governmental failures that perpetuate it. Dreier had previously won the Pulitzer in 2019, and she was a finalist in 2022. Before joining the Times in 2022, she covered immigration policy, federal disaster aid, and police reform at The Washington Post.
Following on the success of their Netflix series based on her book, From Scratch, Tembi Locke ’92 and her sister Attica will adapt Attica’s novel Bluebird, Bluebird in a deal with Universal Television. They will co-write and executive produce the show alongside Richard Abate, Jermaine Johnson, and Will Rowbotham from 3 Arts Entertainment.
Leave If No Response, an original play written by Abby Fisher ’23 that explores themes of friendship, queerness, tradition, Judaism, and growing up, opened at The Tank NYC in June 2024. Fisher wrote and produced the play at Wes during her senior year and it opened at Russell House in April 2023.
Jennifer Lame ’04 won the Oscar for Best Film Editing for her work on Oppenheimer at the 96th Academy Awards ceremony in March. Over the course of award season, she also took home a BAFTA and Critics’ Choice Award for her editing of the Christopher Nolan blockbuster. Lame had previously worked with Nolan on Tenet (2020).
Ken Carpenter ’76, MA ’77, an astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center, was selected in early 2024 as a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) fellow, to help develop a mission concept for placing a UV/optical interferometer on the lunar surface. The NIAC Phase 1 Opportunity is among the most competitive in NASA with a roughly 4% success rate.
MGMT (the indie rock/pop duo helmed by Andrew VanWyngarden ’05 and Ben Goldwasser ’05) released their sixth studio album, Loss of Life, this past spring. The CFA hosted a listening party for students, faculty, and alumni at the Ring Family Performing Arts Hall in February 2024. Loss of Life is the duo’s first studio album since they released Little Dark Age back in 2018.
Kim Nixon ’04 made Business Insider’s list of Black investors changing the face of venture capital for underrepresented communities. Nixon is the founder and managing partner of Open Venture Capital, a firm dedicated to startups disrupting the wellness, sport, fitness, and consumer technology industries.
Mark Schafer ’85 received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship to support his English translation of short fiction by Cuban author Virgilio Piñera. In addition to translating 24 previously untranslated short stories by Piñera, Schafer will revise Cold Tales, his first collection of Piñera’s short fiction, and René’s Flesh, his translation of Piñera’s novel, both of them long out of print. Schafer’s revised translation of the novel and his expanded edition of Cold Tales, containing 77 of Piñera’s stories, will be published by New York Review Books.
David Thomson ’91 was sworn in as the chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court on April 22. Prior to his appointment, Thomson held several positions in the Office of the New Mexico Attorney General, including deputy attorney and director of the Litigation Division, and he served as a judge on the New Mexico 1st Judicial District Court. He is the 43rd chief justice in the state’s history.
Michele Barnwell ’89 won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary (Television) for her work on the Netflix series High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America. In the series, food writer Stephen Satterfield traces the origins of African American cuisine from Africa to Chicago, Harlem, New Orleans, and Atlanta, while engaging with chefs, bakers, and culinary trailblazers about their connections to food and the Black experience in America.
Zachariah Ezer ’17 was selected for the Liberation Theatre Company’s Writing Residency Program for 2024-25, alongside three other emerging playwrights. The program offers residents dramaturgical and career support over the course of a 10-month period, in which they are required to complete a first draft of a full-length play. Ezer is a Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Fellow, the winner of Kumu Kahua Theatre’s Hawai’i Prize, a member of The Civilians R&D group, and is currently under commission from Theater J Plays.
