Alumni & Student Stories
Isabella Donohoe
Essay PublicationThe Bowdoin Journal of Cinema accepted ENGL Major Isabella Donahue's essay "Life is a Drag: Music in The Doom Generation and My Own Private Idaho" for publication in their 2025 issue (forthcoming).
Mazie McNamara, 2025
Poem PublicationMazie McNamara (’25) published her poem “Eating Oranges” in the Summer 2024 issue of The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought (Vol. 65, No. 4), published by Pittsburg State University. McNamara credits ENGL 306: How to Be a Writer for helping her take her writing seriously and envision a creative future. The course required submitting work to national publications—an assignment that led to the poem’s acceptance.
Meagan Graves, 2023
Poem PublicationMeagan Graves, class of 2023 original poem, Anadromus, was published in Sing the Salmon Homes: Poems from Washington State. She also is the recipient of the 2022 Michael and Gail Gurian Writing Award for Poetry.
Anders Greene-Crow, 2009
Book PublicationEnglish alumni, Anders Greene-Crow, '09, has published a new book in the field of Early Modern Studies. The book, Austerity Measures, is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Haley Wilson, 2021
Starbucks Corporation, Seattle“In [our major classes] we discuss something, we nuance something, we complicate something, and then talk about it in smaller groups one-on-one… [W]e…challenge one another—we question one another, we…say ‘I don’t know have that same reading’ or…‘what do you think[?]’… that’s a huge skill… “We’re a lot more likely to have questions of ethics, questions of morals, questions of social justice issues in my English classrooms… and that’s top of mind everywhere. That is what people want in a company, and that’s a big value that you can bring to a company.”
Claire Topalian, 2011
Principal, The Cove Group, Seattle“Analyzing information, connecting the dots, and then—I think usually most interestingly, inserting new information into the gaps or overlaying new information on top of what you’re reading. I think that’s where some really magical stuff happens in English. And I actually think that that produces an ability to think so differently—that allows you to do really endless things in your day-to-day professional interactions. The good news is that you can basically apply that to anything.”
