English in the Public Sphere: Alumni

"As the holiday season approaches and the Twin Cities strings up its lights," notes Professor and Chair Ellen Messer-Davidow, "English has plenty of dazzle to contribute to the festivities." For news about faculty, student, and alumnae/i accomplishments and awards, check out the winter 2011 alumni magazine, English@Minnesota. Professors Nabil Matar, Maria Damon, and Peter Campion are featured, along with lots more!

Monica Nassif (BA 1982) was named 2011 University of Minnesota Entrepreneur of the Year at a McNamara Alumni Center reception September 8. Nassif is the founder of Caldrea, a luxury cleaning products line, and its offshoot the Mrs. Meyers' Clean Day brand. Her success, she says in an interview, grew out of an internship with Dayton-Hudson which her English adviser helped her acquire. After almost two decades as a brand-builder for prominent retailers and consumer product firms, she started a marketing communications business in Minneapolis, then initiated Caldrea in 1999.

The summer issue of the University of Minnesota Alumni Association magazine Minnesota features four English alumnae. Kathleen Glasgow (MFA 2002), coordinator of the Creative Writing Program, won first place in the magazine's 12th annual fiction contest with her story "Leaving"; judge Ian Graham Leask (BA 1980, MA 1986) compared the story to "a tune in your head that won't go away." Six pages later, the three editors of the up-and-coming literary arts magazine Paper Darts are interviewed: Jamie Millard, Regan Smith, and Meghan Suszynski (all BA 2009) relate how their colorful glossy started out on home printers and a Singer sewing machine.

BA alumnus Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the Periodic Table of the Elements, just released in paperback, was publishing's sleeper hit of 2010: a science history that surprised its author as much as anyone by making the New York Times Bestseller List, primarily via word of mouth. But South Dakota native Kean, a 2002 summa cum laude double major in English and Physics, has fashioned a ridiculously readable collection of anecdotes about the elements, from hydrogen to ununbium. "I really think that the human mind works best through stories," notes Kean in an interview. More. . .