Class Note 2000
As I started to write this column, I was feeling quite accomplished having gone for a run, gotten dinner on the table and found some time to scroll through Twitter. That was until I dug into the news and press releases that were sent my way during the past few months. Fifteen-plus years post-graduation it’s safe to say that people are rocking it.
Omar Rashid, M.D., J.D., provided the following update: “After medical school, law school, residency, two fellowships and more than 50 peer-reviewed book chapter, abstract, and journal publications, I have finally returned home to south Florida, where I am practicing complex general surgical oncology in the same community where I grew up. Despite a very busy schedule I have had many opportunities to travel and participate in meetings around the world, and it has been great running into Dartmouth alumni across the globe. My brother, Ali Rashid ’01, is also back home practicing cardiac critical care anesthesiology and I am extremely enthusiastic about the challenges and opportunities ahead.”
We have more published writers among us! Michael Cohen is currently an assistant professor of English at UCLA and recently published a book, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). “The book is a study of how people read and used poems in the 19th-century United States and of the ways that poems helped to generate and enable various kinds of social experiences. The book is both a literary history and an account of people’s lived relationships to literary texts.” It’s gotten great reviews, so check it out.
Also, in the “rocking it” category, in August the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Michael Leong won a literature translation fellowship to support the translation into English of Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. According to the press release, “Leong is collaborating with Ignacio Infante, an assistant professor of comparative literature and Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis, to translate Sky-Quake, a long prose poem by the Chilean avant-gardist Vicente Huidobro. A poet, translator and critic, Leong will begin the fall 2015 semester as a new assistant professor in the English department. His publications include the book-length poem Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012), which won a Face Out grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses; I, the Worst of All (BlazeVOX, 2009), a translation of the contemporary Chilean poet Estela Lamat; and peer-review articles on conceptual poetry and ethnic American surrealism in Contemporary Literature, Modern Language Studies and Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture. He has also written reviews and essays for such venues as the Boston Review, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic and the Los Angeles Review of Books.”
In the delayed-news, lost-in-my-inbox category, Hollis von Summer and her husband, Mike, welcomed daughter Lexi Louise Kennedy to their family in December 2013. “We have been living in Greenwich, Connecticut, for five years now and have the pleasure of seeing many Dartmouth friends frequently. Our son, Dean, is starting first grade this fall and life is great but flying by too quickly.”
In other baby news, Caroline Hribar and her husband, Mallon FitzPatrick, welcomed daughter Dylan Brodie FitzPatrick into the world on July 2. “She’s got daddy’s hair, mommy’s sleeping gene and a whole lot of opinions that she’s already sharing. Big sister Goose hasn’t made up her mind yet, but we think she’ll come around when Dylan learns to play fetch.”
Congrats all! Now, back to my wine.
—Kelly Heaps, 3666 Willowlea Court, Unit B, Cincinnati, OH 45208; heaps.k@pg.com
