If you ever wanted to write a travel memoir or capture a few stories from your vacations, Boston College graduate Jillian Schedneck has written a guide book to help you accomplish your goal. Write Your Travel Memoir: A Step-by-Step Guide was released earlier this year and offers tips on how to begin and end your story as well as how to introduce your quest and weave in backstory. Schedneck graduated from BC with a bachelor’s degree in English in 2002. She holds a master of fine arts in creative writing from West Virginia University, where she taught Composition and Rhetoric courses to undergraduates. Her own memoir, Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights, is based on her experiences living and teaching university students in the United Arab Emirates.
How to write a travel memoir
A social justice schema for educators
BC Lynch School of Education and Human Development Associate Professor Martin Scanlan has written a book that provides educators and school leaders in both the private and public sectors a highly accessible and easily adaptable framework that can help them help create more equitable schools. In Navigating Social Justice (Harvard University Press, 2023), Scanlan distills wisdom gleaned from the experiences of a variety of educational professionals as well as from his own decades of work in equity-focused partnership with elementary schools. According to the publisher: “Scanlan’s schema brings together five dimensions—inclusivity, communities of practice, critical formation, social ecosystems, and practical wisdom—that work together holistically to eradicate inequitable practices and policies and promote robust teaching and inclusive learning. For each dimension, the book features real-life vignettes that focus the conversation, exercises that encourage reflection, and suggested opportunities for the application of its central ideas. The practical guidance offered in this book not only will enable educational institutions to best meet the needs of families and community members but will also help leaders cultivate the moral and intellectual judgment needed to address social justice issues in schools.”
‘Kantika’ by Elizabeth Graver
Kantika, the latest novel by Boston College Professor of English Elizabeth Graver, is a multi-generational saga of one family’s displacement across four different countries. Kantika is a genre-defying mix of personal family history and fiction, drawn from interviews Graver conducted years ago with her grandmother. The novel follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, who comes from an elite Sephardic Jewish family of early 20th-century Istanbul. The establishment of the Turkish republic and subsequent loss of the Cohens’ fortune compels them to relocate to Spain, drastically changing the life she had expected to lead. Rebecca endures a failed marriage while working as a seamstress, concealing her ethno-religious identity in a country that had expelled Jews four centuries ago and is still hostile to them. Her odyssey takes her to Cuba for an arranged second marriage, then to New York City, where she undertakes the challenge of raising—and empowering—her disabled stepdaughter. Kantika is replete with elements of the various landscapes, cultures, and languages Rebecca encounters and processes over the years as she contemplates her personal and familial identity, and how much of it will be passed along to future generations. Read more in BC News.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged English Department, family saga, Jewish, novel
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‘To Carry Wonder’
Boston College graduate Emese Parker is author of To Carry Wonder: A Memoir and Guide to Adventures in Pregnancy and Beyond, a new type of pregnancy book that aims to nurture, inspire, and equip mothers-to-be and postpartum mothers. Drawing from her own personal and clinical experiences with pregnancy, Parker authentically presents pregnancy through a curated blend of stories and evidence-based information. Topics covered include mental health and body image, nutrition and activity, health care rights and providers, relaxation and sleep, labor or Cesarean birth prep, and connecting with and feeding your baby, among many others. Parker graduated from the Connell School of Nursing with a master’s degree in 2008. She is a board-certified women’s health nurse practitioner, certified perinatal mental health specialist, and mom. Part of the proceeds from the sales of To Carry Wonder will go to International Justice Mission, a global nonprofit working to combat slavery and violence against women and children.
Posted in Alumni Authors
Tagged Connell School of Nursing, health care, motherhood, pregnancy
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Fantastical Blackness in Genre Fictions
Rhonda Frederick, a professor of English and African and African Diaspora Studies at BC, has written a literature-based interdisciplinary study of blackness in the Americas. Evidence of Things Not Seen: Fantastical Blackness in Genre Fictions (Rutgers University Press, 2022) interprets blackness in fantasy, thriller, science fiction, mystery, erotic romance, and police procedural fictions written by African Diaspora writers. From the publisher: “The ‘fantastical’ in fantastical blackness is conceived by an unrestrained imagination because it lives, despite every attempt at annihilation; this blackness also amazes because it refuses the limits of anti-blackness. Ultimately, the imaginable possibilities in these popular genres offer strategies through which readers can ask different questions of and for blackness. When black writers center this expressive quality, they make fantastical blackness available to a broad audience that then uses its imaginable vocabularies to reshape extra-literary realities. Ultimately, popular genres’ imaginable truths offer strategies through which the made up can be made real.” Frederick is also the author of “Colón Man a Come”: Mythographies of Panamá Canal Migration.
Poetry collections from BC Law student
Billie Bioku, who will graduate this month from Boston College Law School, has published two books of poetry. We Ponder: Unsettled Minds (Archway Publishing, 2023), Bioku’s debut poetry collection, is a reflection of classic poetry with abstract concepts that touches on subjects such as love, spirituality/religion, heartbreak, mental illness, and more. “I want readers to know that they are not alone in the experiences they go through, and that I hope this book helps them to become more vulnerable with themselves and others,” said Bioku. Her second collection, Untethered Grounds (Archway Publishing, 2023), focuses on elemental properties, society, self, and humanity.
How Königsberg Became Kaliningrad
German Blood, Slavic Soil (Cornell University Press, 2023), a new book by Boston College Associate Professor of History Nicole Eaton, reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, 20th-century Europe’s two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. From the publisher: Eaton “details an intricate timeline, first describing how Königsberg, a 700-year-old German port city on the Baltic Sea and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant, became infamous in the 1930s as the easternmost bastion of Hitler’s Third Reich and the launching point for the Nazis’ genocidal war in the East. She then describes how, after being destroyed by bombing and siege warfare in 1945, Königsberg became Kaliningrad, the westernmost city of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own—in both wartime occupation and as integral territory of the two regimes.”
Solidarity and lived ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury
Lessons learned from an in-depth study of and an immersive experience at St. Mary of the Angels, a small, poor, urban Catholic parish in Boston, are at the heart of a new book by Boston College alumna Susan Bigelow Reynolds. People Get Ready: Ritual, Solidarity, and Lived Ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury (Fordham University Press, 2023) weaves together archived letters, oral histories, stories, photographs, newspaper articles, and archdiocesan documents to trace how St. Mary’s parish stayed open and thrived by parishioners making solidarity an ecclesial virtue. Reynolds is an assistant professor of Catholic studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. She graduated from the School of Theology and Ministry with a M.T.S. in 2013 and from the University’s Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences with a Ph.D. in 2018. She gave a talk on her book earlier this month at Boston College, where she was honored with the STM Alumni Distinguished Service Award. Read more from BC News.
Posted in Alumni Authors
Tagged Boston, Catholic Church, Catholicism, parish, School of Theology and Ministry
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The Half of It
Bestselling author Juliette Fay, a graduate of Boston College, has written a new novel about settling the past, rekindling lost friendships, and discovering love when it’s least expected. The Half of It (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2023) tells the story of 58-year-old Helen Spencer who has a chance to reconnect with Cal Crosby 40 years, one marriage, three children, and one grandchild after their romantic night together her senior year of high school. The Half of It is a novel filled with humor, heart, and grace. Fay is the author of several books, including Shelter Me, City of Flickering Light, and Catch Us When We Fall. In an essay for Lit Hub, she writes about focusing her novel on a protagonist who is not young, but not old.
BC grad named a local poet laureate
Boston College graduate Lynne Viti has been named poet laureate for Westwood, Massachusetts. In her role as the town’s poet laureate, Viti will encourage the reading and writing of poetry, mentor a teen poet, and write several poems for local events and holidays. She currently facilitates a poets-in-the-schools program and a poetry workshop at the Westwood Public Library, but hopes to expand those offerings. She also plans to hold community poetry slams and a poetry contest. Viti’s most recent collection of poetry, published in 2022, is titled The Walk to Cefalù. Her other poetry titles include Dancing at Lake Montebello and Baltimore Girls. Her short fiction collection is Going Too Fast. Read more here and in the Boston Globe.
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