I recently finished reading Sonja Ardoin and becky martinez’s illuminating book Straddling Class in the Academy. Social class had been on my mind since reading Anthony Lubrano’s In Limbo and I jumped on this book after hearing about it from a colleague at Penn State’s Schreyer Institution for Teaching Excellence. Limbo was a personally impactful book, as I […]

Death has always felt close at hand. My dad died when I was 13 from his fourth heart attack. This has haunted me as I reached the age of his bout with heart disease. My aunt died by suicide, so did a friend from college, and eventually my mom. This haunts me as I deal […]

It has probably been over a month since I finished Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith’s excellent Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter. This review got caught up like so many things in the crush of a semester’s end. But I could not simply let a short review pass. […]

After reading Hamilton, I decided to take a break on non-fiction and work on a novel. This year, Penn State Harrisburg is reading Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. This is an engrossing read. I read it in two weeks. The book covers the gamut – racism, sexism, bullying, and more – in a […]

This winter break I decided to tackle Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. To be honest, this read was inspired by my immense enjoyment of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical. I had known about the musical for years, but had not listened to it until spring of 2020. After listening to it constantly when we were on […]