At a moment when college leaders are navigating choppy seas, Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran ’69 has written a timely analysis of university leadership that outlines what it will take to lead higher education institutions effectively in the coming decade and beyond.

The book, “The New College President: How a Generation of Diverse Leaders Is Changing Higher Education,” co-written with Terrence MacTaggart and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, profiles seven university leaders and describes the skills and personal qualities they possess that have made them successful.

Few are as qualified as Wilson-Oyelaran to opine on the topic. She served as president of Kalamazoo College from 2005 to 2016, a period that included a major economic recession, and also was named as chair of the board of directors of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities for the 2013-2014 academic year.

In the book, Wilson-Oyelaran discusses some of the major challenges facing the college and university presidency, among them high turnover rates, debilitating financial pressures and conflicting institutional strategies. For example, she says that presidents’ shorter terms may negatively impact institutions, since it generally takes time for presidents to understand school culture and garner the trust of their communities.

For Wilson-Oyelaran, that trust is more vital now than ever. “Colleges and universities are being asked to change more rapidly and more dynamically, but the ability to do that requires someone who is known and trusted, which takes time,” she says. “A leader who is embedded in the community is much more able to make the changes that are necessary right now.”

One quality that Wilson-Oyelaran and MacTaggart found in all the successful presidents they profiled was the significant adversity they faced. “Adversity gives you empathy and a great deal of resilience, which is of particular importance for leading institutions of higher education right now,” says Wilson-Oyelaran. “As the arrows get slung at you, it’s critical to be able to let them roll off and continue to move forward. You develop a sixth sense of how to keep focusing on what is of value and what to let go of.”

During her years at Pomona, Wilson-Oyelaran was a galvanizing figure who was instrumental in creating The Claremont Colleges’ first Black Student Union in 1967 and the Black Studies Center in 1969. She says that she’s deeply encouraged by how her generation’s efforts transformed higher education, both in terms of what the student body looks like, and in the expanded breadth of the curriculum.

“When I look at Pomona today, in many ways the institution represents what we hoped to see,” she says. “It’s pretty incredible to see how the field of African American studies has flourished nationally, and to feel that I maybe did a little bit to move that forward.”

Los escritores y el flamenco. La lucha antifranquista (1967-1978)

Tyler Barbour ’09 explores the intersections among Spanish literature, flamenco and the political resistance of the Franco Regime.

I Am We

Leslie Barnard Booth ’04 delves into the mysteries of crow behavior in this lyrical informational picture book inspired by the urban crows of Portland, Oregon.

Disaster Nationalism

In this ethnography, Vivian Y. Choi ’01 examines how the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami fostered new forms of governance and militarization during Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war.

The New Rules of Influence

Lida Citroën ’86 guides leaders through a new paradigm of leadership in which authenticity, passion and honesty
are required.

Hidden Healers

Through her experience providing therapeutic programs to prisoners, Stephanie Covington ’64 gives readers a look inside women’s prisons along with recommendations for change.

Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding

Lian Dolan ’87 writes a modern comedy of manners in this novel about two mothers planning their children’s dream wedding in Montecito, California.

Animating the Victorians

Patrick C. Fleming ’05 traces the links between the Golden Age of children’s literature and Disney films, exploring Disney’s adaptations of Victorian texts.

I Trust Her Completely

In this debut novel, Christine Henneberg ’05 observes female friendship and 21st-century motherhood alongside themes of abortion and ambition.

Deadly Vision

Todd Severin ’85 crafts a medical and psychological thriller about a revolutionary medical breakthrough and the warring factions in medicine and politics to shut it down.

Why have just one? For this issue’s “blurb,” we’re featuring five poems by alumni authors

Hongo poses in front of his poem, inscribed on a plaque at the Smith Campus Center

Under The Oaks At Holmes Hall, Overtaken By Rain

By Garrett Hongo ’73

A desert downpour in early spring,
and I’m standing under California oaks,
gazing through rain as the grey sky thunders.
I don’t know why the nightingale sings
to Kubla Khan and not to me, nineteen
and marked by nothing, not even ceremony
or the slash of wind tearing through trees.
I don’t know why Ishmael alone is left
to speak of the sea’s great beast, why
the ground sinks and slides against itself,
why the blue lupines will rise and quilt
through the tawny grasses on the hillsides.
I can’t explain this garment of rain on
   my shoulders
or the sour cloth of my poverty unwinding
like a shroud as the giant eucalyptus
strips and sheds its grey parchments of skin
and stands mottled and nude in the
   shining rains.
I want something sullen as thundering skies,
thick as earthmilk, brown and sluicing
across the streets, grievous as the flood of waters.
I want unfelt sorrows to give away and
   wrought absence
to exchange for the imperfect shelter of
   these oaks,
for the froth of green ivy around my feet,
for the sky without gods and the earth
   without perplexity.
I want to have something like prayer to pay
or a mission to renounce as a fee
for my innocence under cloud-cover
and these furious nightingales of thunder,
companions of song in this untormented sea
of memory uncrowded with bliss or pain.

From “OCEAN OF CLOUDS: Poems.” Reprinted by permission of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Garrett Hongo. Hongo has published three books of poetry, including “The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo” (2022).

Moon

By Jodie Hollander ’99

do you ever dream
just as I do,
of having a kind of sister
with you in the sky?
To comb one another’s
milky white surfaces,
or gaze out in awe
at fierce bright stars;
just to be together
amidst the emptiness.
Or are you content
all alone up there,
hovering high above
those darkening trees,
who too must hover
above the world below,
that still somehow sparkles
with artificial lights?

Cloud Study

By S. Brook Corfman ’13

I believed long hair alone
would, like rain, wash
my gender away but the rain

rarely cleans, now—it misses
the spot under the tree, moves
the dirt across the street, cannot

reach into my throat or under
the car unless I open for it.

Corfman (they/them) is the author of the poetry collections My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites and Luxury, Blue Lace.

Night
Class

By Bruce Bond ’75

We would only get so far,
    given the casualties
buried in each point of view.
  This one, this one, this.
To see them was to smell them.
One by one.
Then we read Wilfred Owen,
  a lyric
  whose anger comes later,
  after the specifics.
Take this face,
  how the penlight of the medic
  pierces the addled eye
    just so far.
  In each a sky so deep
  it swallows up the stars.
  Take this gate,
how it chatters like a telegraph key,
and you wake afraid,
knowing so little of your subject.
The siren
in the distance is no stranger
  anymore.
    It is headed
  for your hospital wing,
  where it could be a while,
  if you are waiting for your son.
We could stare at the wall
  together,
    as some at altars do,
  where the mouths
    of nocturnal flowers
  open to accept,
  as sacrament,
  a bee across the tongue.

Poem first appeared in Poetry (July/August 2025) and is reprinted with permission. Bond has authored 37 books and poetry collections and is an Emeritus Professor at the University of North Texas.

This summer, author and professor Soma Mei Sheng Frazier ’95 perched on a stool in front of an audience of Pomona alumni and opened her debut novel, a high-stakes road trip story published after nearly three decades of authoring shorter works. “Ready to get read to like babies at bedtime?” When she closed the book again, Frazier’s role model—Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History Samuel Yamashita—piped up to engage her in conversation about Off the Books, which, per The New York Times, “captures the relatable toggle between the private and the collective, between sinking into the anxieties of your life and grieving for the cruelties of the world.” In it, Frazier introduces us to Měi, a college dropout who begins driving private clients—including a man with a mysterious suitcase—to make ends meet. PCM spoke to Frazier about the book, the Uyghur ethnic minority group and her enduring admiration for Yamashita.

PCM: This book contains elements of mystery, drama, coming of age, Chinese American and multi-ethnic identity struggles, and the juxtaposition of East vs. West (globally but also between the two U.S. coasts). Did you set out to tackle all these issues, and how do you see them working in tandem to set the novel’s tone?

Frazier: The seed of Off the Books was a single issue: China’s treatment of the Uyghur ethnic minority group, many of whom have been “disappeared” into detention camps for such offenses as sporting the wrong beard. Their birth rates have plummeted, and children have been instructed not to speak the language their mothers sang them to sleep in.

To shine a light on that faraway situation, I set about writing the very American story of Měi Brown, a college dropout who finds herself driving a secretive private client from Oakland, California, to Syracuse, New York. As I wrote, all those themes grew from Měi’s personal growth and fraught relationships with a Caucasian dad and Chinese American mom, which became the backdrop for a quirky—and funny, I’ve been told—story about the circumstances that lead people to take big risks, and the consequences  of leaving one’s home.

PCM: Several of the central characters do not fit typical molds. Lăoyé, the main character’s grandfather, is a smack-talking, weed-smoking, 86-year-old video-gamer from China. Does this reflect your own personal experiences? How do you believe it adds to the major themes of the story?

Frazier: Well, typical molds can suck it. In my personal experience, people gain freedom when we stop contorting ourselves to fit those molds. Lăoyé is actually almost everyone’s favorite character, and I believe that’s because he is a mold breaker. He’s unapologetically sincere. As children, we say what we truly think and feel because we haven’t learned how to do otherwise yet. Then, as we gain age and wisdom like Lăoyé, if we’re lucky, we return to authenticity. When we meet Měi, she’s just beginning that journey back to herself, remembering the difference between reaction and intentional, self-driven action. On top of that, transporting her sweet (and I’ll say it: sexy) client Henry Lee across the states ultimately leads her to take the wheel in other ways.

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier ’95

PCM: The story unfolds through flashbacks intertwined with the progress of Měi’s road trip through the U.S. Although disorienting at first, it nicely accorded with real life—that is, we are constantly relating the present to past events we have experienced, even without noticing it. Does that structure serve other purposes?

Frazier: We are always toggling back and forth between present and past. Through the structure, my hope is that the road trip itself gives the story momentum, while the flashbacks (interspersed with present-day action) allow the characters to sort of experience that languid mental wandering that we often do on long drives.

PCM: Why did you use pinyin (romanization of Mandarin Chinese characters) for Chinese terms, including notating them with tone marks in an English-language book?

Frazier: Měi’s Chinese is rudimentary, so she’s limited to the kind of household language that one picks up organically from an immigrant parent, like “I’m hungry.” I wanted to permit people who know Chinese, or grew up in households that spoke Chinese but do not have complete command of the language, to relate. I also wanted readers who don’t know Chinese to experience the sort of disorientation that Měi herself does when the other characters suddenly start conversing in this language she doesn’t fully understand. So that’s why I didn’t italicize the Chinese. Italicization implies a sort of separation from English. But then in real life, there’s no separation. I wanted what was on the page to mirror the experience of hearing the characters’ conversations in real life.

PCM: What do you ultimately hope that this book accomplishes?

Frazier: I hope that Off the Books will make readers laugh and remind us to be kind to one another. I also hope it will pique interest in China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, ethnic minorities and prisoners of conscience. Because, yes, they’re halfway around the world, but I think we’d be fools to think of their issues as distant. China is the U.S.’s number one trade partner, and likely to gain regional hegemony and become a superpower. Before speaking with you, I did an interview with Radio Free Asia where I learned from the Uyghur interviewer that family members of every one of her Uyghur colleagues have disappeared. Ultimately, I want people to know about this and acknowledge the ugly truths about our number one trade partner, just as I hope we do about this country. And then to decide on their own whether and how to act on that knowledge to make things better for everyone.

PCM: How did Pomona College help or inspire you to undertake this book?

Frazier: When I was preparing to head to Pomona from New Hampshire, I walked into my mom’s office, and she was writing a check. I asked, “Hey, who’s that check going to?” And she replied that she was sending my aunties some money. I inquired why. After all, they were doing well. She said, “No, not those aunties—it’s for the aunties we had to leave behind in China.” And I didn’t know about these aunties, so I went off to Pomona reflecting on that experience and about the things I didn’t know about China. Those sentiments inspired me to delve further as an Asian studies major and Asian languages and literatures minor. Furthermore, I think a lot of experiences at Pomona—particularly being in Samuel Yamashita’s class—can make a person who might not have been focused on global politics think about global politics. Dr. Yamashita also makes us relate the issues we’re thinking about to our own behavior in the world. As the saying goes, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. In classes like his, you think you’re eating candy. Just all sugar. Yet you leave medicated, fortified with information about the world.

In The Presidents and the People, Corey Brettschneider ’95 explores how five American presidents in different eras abused their power and how citizens fought back to restore democracy.

Chanté Griffin ’00 helps readers develop a vision of anti-racism and move toward racial healing in Loving Your Black Neighbor as Yourself: A Guide to Closing the Space Between Us.

As an editor of American Aesthetics: Theory and Practice, Walter B. Gulick ’60 proposes a distinctly American approach to aesthetic judgment and practice through this collection of essays.

In his debut novel The Emperor and the Endless Palace, Justinian Huang ’09 crafts a genre-bending queer Asian love story that unfolds across multiple timelines.

Jade Sasser ’97 explores climate-driven reproductive anxiety, placing race and social justice at the center, in Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future

The Five Ranks of Zen: Tozan’s Path of Being, Nonbeing and Compassion is a comprehensive guide to the teachings of Zen Buddhism by American Zen teacher Gerry Shishin Wick ’62.

As president emerita of Kalamazoo College and trustee emerita of Pomona College, Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran ’69 presents a fresh perspective on higher education leadership in The New College President: How a Generation of Diverse Leaders Is Changing Higher Education. 

BOOK SUBMISSIONS

If you’ve had a book published and would like to submit it for inclusion in Bookmarks, please send a review copy to or email us

Lorraine Harry, PCM Books Editor,
550 North College Ave.
Claremont, CA 91711