In 2018, Jeffery Coleman became intrigued as he watched the U.S. men’s curling team win Olympic gold. He enrolled in a Learn to Curl class at the Milwaukee Curling Club, and, he says, “I fell in love with it. It’s the accuracy, finesse, and strategy to make sure every shot counts. That’s what I find fascinating. It’s very much like chess on ice. If I do this move, I need to think two steps ahead what the other team will do.” Leo Moorhead, who teaches curling classes at the club, says Coleman enthusiastically embraced the sport. “He jumped in with both feet. With that attitude you can’t go wrong.”
Curling isn’t Coleman’s only passion. The professor of Iberian studies at Northwestern University recalls that during a college term in Madrid, Spain, he visited a store that sold fountain pens. “I had a vision that using a fountain pen, my handwriting would be better,” he says, explaining that his grandmother is deaf, so he had to write letters to communicate with her.
That vision blossomed into a collection of about 100 pens. “During the pandemic, when everyone was baking sourdough bread, I came up with this wild idea to start a podcast. I had been listening to lots of other podcasts about pens and stationery, but there was nothing in Spanish,” he says. He created a podcast on the topic titled Tinterías, a play on the words for ink and silliness.
Meanwhile, the professor became a certified Cava wine educator and in 2023 started a wine academy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He also is at work on two books—one on representations of Blackness in contemporary Spanish culture and literature and another on wine as a means to understand Spanish history and culture. “For me,” he says, “to learn is to be able to teach others.”
