Grads

Wole Ojurongbe (MALS’08), the current director of the MALS program, and Amanda Skinner, from the graduate studies department, coordinated a MALS lunch with two writers on July 22. The fea- tured writers were Elizabeth Atkinson (MALS’95) and Larry Olmstead (MALS’06). The purpose of the lunch was to share the experiences and advice of

two successful writers with the current MALS students and graduates.

Elizabeth entered the MALS program with an interest in anthropology, which she pointed out includes cultural stories. She credits the program with helping to shape her voice and find her audi- ence, which she realized is one of children rather than adults. Her MALS thesis is a collection of short stories about women and their mentors.

After receiving her degree, Elizabeth worked as an intern for a publishing company and began her career as a freelance writer. Her first published middle-grade novel, From Alice to Zen & Everyone In Between (Lerner Books), came out in 2008 and was well received. She followed this two years later with a tween book, I, Emma Freke (also Lerner Books). The book was so popular that Alice Edi- tions published it in French in 2012 with the title Je Suis Un Phenomene. She has a new book out this fall, The Sugar Mountain Snowball (Islandport Press), and The Island of Beyond (Lerner Books) is scheduled for release in April 2016.

Larry chose the MALS program because he lived in the area, worked at home and was at- tracted to the diversity of professors and students. He found the program valuable and thought it fit his needs better than an M.F.A. He discussed the art of writing and stressed the point that writing a successful pitch to sell an idea for an article can be as important as writing the resulting ar- ticle. He also discussed different kinds of writing. Whereas there are many different ways to tell a story in a memoir, writing a screenplay is a mat- ter of showing rather than just telling. He credits the influence of professor Tom Powers for the successful completion of his thesis on humor in travel writing.

Larry is an award-winning journalist and au- thor of several books and several thousand articles for major magazines and newspapers worldwide. His areas of expertise include travel, culinary topics, sports (especially golf and skiing), lifestyle topics and business and celebrity profiles. His first major national hardcover release was Getting Into Guinness (Harper Collins, 2008), a mixture of history and participatory journalism capturing the colorful story of the bestselling copyrighted book in human history, Guinness World Records. Larry entertained the lunch group by describing how he worked at setting or breaking three world records in the process. His new book, Real Food, Fake Food, is scheduled to be published in the fall of 2016 by Algonquin.

The MALS Alumni Association held its annual luncheon and meeting on July 16 in the Hanover Inn. The guest speaker was professor Diederik Vandewalle, who gave a very informa- tive and rather chilling talk on the Middle East. The open meeting of the Alumni Council, the governing body of the association, was held im- mediately afterward. Preston McBride (MALS’13) was elected to replace Diana Lawrence (MALS’11), who left because of time constraints with her new job as director for media relations for Dartmouth. Preston is currently working on a Ph.D. in U.S. his- tory at the University of California, Los Angeles.

175 Greensboro Road, Hanover, NH 03755; (603) 643-3789; m.jane.welsh.gr@ dartmouth.edu