What is the role of creativity in steering the work of dancers, poets, scientists and activists? What follows is a condensed and collated conversation with four Pomona professors from different fields, drawing on themes about the practice and teaching of what it means to create.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies as well as gender and women’s studies, is a feminist academic, public policy expert and activist from the Dominican Republic.

Jane Liu, professor of chemistry professor, is also CEO of BRT Biotechnologies, a small-molecule drug discovery startup she co-founded with fellow Sagehen Greg Copeland ’96.

John Pennington, associate professor of dance, is the artistic director of Pennington Dance Group and ARC (A Room to Create) Pasadena after a career as a performer and teacher with the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company.

Prageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, is the author of six collections of poetry, including Onement Won, to be published in September. She is a recipient of a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.

Q: Welcome, all. We’re interested in how you think about creativity. Is it innate? Is it a practice, something that can be summoned?

Pennington: I think this has been a question of the ages. You’ve often heard about “the muses descending” and all of these ways that people are creative, and no one can put their finger on it. Over the years, particularly working in a liberal arts college and through my own investigation and curiosity, I’ve found that creativity lies a lot in neuroscience.

There’s the prefrontal cortex; it’s the executive director. There’s also the “fight or flight” response of the sympathetic nervous system. So there’s a saying that creativity comes in the three B’s—the bed, the bath and the bar. If you look at the bed, the bath and the bar, those are three places that you relax and you feel safe, for the most part. The prefrontal cortex kind of shuts off. The “fight or flight” response is not active, either. A lot of artists have said that they have their most creativity before falling asleep or when they wake up, and that’s when the brain is partly shut down.

Q: That reminds me that Paul McCartney [of the Beatles] has said the melody of “Yesterday” came to him in a dream. Have any of you had ideas or solutions come to you that way?

Liu: I don’t know if I’ve solved the problem in my dream but when you’re sort of dozing, something might come in there. I actually will make sure I get up and go write it down. Maybe that’s the key, [since] I’d like to  sleep … I don’t want to stay up and work it out, but I don’t want to forget it, either!

Q: Jane, many of us think first of the arts when we think about creativity. But what is the role of creativity in the sciences?

Liu: Whenever you’re doing scientific research or trying to progress science forward, you’re never doing the same thing someone else did. It always has to be something new. You need to think: What is the question I even want to ask? That requires creativity. Then, how are you going to approach answering that question or testing your hypothesis? You and I could ask the exact same question but take two completely different approaches based on what inspired us at that time, what our background is, what we read that morning or the conversation we had down the hall. So pulling these different pieces together—and then fitting that into progressing science and doing scientific research—that, to me, is a creative process.

A visualization lab from the Human-Centered Design class

Design as Process for Impact

What is The Hive?

The Hive, more formally known as the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity, aims to foster collaboration and innovation for students of the Claremont Colleges.

What does The Hive do?

The Hive is a design and innovation center that hosts courses and activities that are exploratory, collaborative, and experiential, including…

• full-credit courses in Human-Centered Design and Impact Innovation
• workshops and events that introduce alternative ways of engaging with the liberal arts
• makerspaces where students are given access to materials for building, prototyping, sewing, screen printing, woodworking, and music production
• courses from around the 7Cs

Who does The Hive work with?

The Hive offers human-centered design collaborations with a diverse variety of community partners, ranging from The LA Department of Health to LAist Public Radio and StoryHouse Ventures.

Get your organization involved!

Fred Bolarinwa (HMC ’25), Janny Wu (PZ ’25), Michelle Tran ’24, Cece Malone ’24

Q: Esther, what are some of the ways you experience creativity in the social sciences?

Hernández-Medina: The area where I use creativity the most is in my teaching. Especially during the pandemic, I really rethought and retooled all my classes. Pomona’s Information Technology Services and The Claremont Colleges Center for Teaching and Learning had all these workshops, and I took almost all of them. One way is putting together digital books: We use Pressbooks to collect students’ class papers. It makes them feel empowered as authors: “Oh, wait, I am publishing, this is so cool.” Some use the link in their graduate school applications. I also sometimes use the link to their papers in the digital book when I’m writing recommendation letters for them. The students are the ones who come up with the title for the book, the subtitles, the art for the cover. So that’s another way of making them reconnect with their creativity. In some of my classes, the final project is now a podcast about their papers, after learning how to produce and edit podcasts at The Hive.

Q: Prageeta, as a poet, how do you draw out creativity in your students?

Sharma: For me, creativity comes from reading and teaching and community and attachment. What is so much fun for me is this class on the theme of diaries and daybooks that I’m teaching now. My late husband was married prior to me, and he left me his first wife’s diary she had kept for many years in the 1990s before she died in 1998. She was a really stunning person and it’s a beautiful diary. He said, “Please write about her if you feel compelled to.” I also have his writings that he left me, notes for me to read after he passed. So in class we started talking about what diaries mean to us, what kind of writing we find there, and what we hope to imagine for ourselves with private writing. I try to bring questions and subjects and work I’m engaged with to my students, to think and work and share interests together. We nurture, I think, a safe classroom that becomes sacred to our writing and to our ideas of ourselves.

Q: You’ve been able to keep writing poetry at such difficult times in your life, publishing the collection Grief Sequence following the death of your first husband, Dale Sherrard, to cancer in 2015. You tragically lost your second husband, Mike Stussy, to cancer in 2023, and your upcoming collection Onement Won includes poems you wrote during his illness. It’s so common for people to try to shut everything out. Did you will yourself to continue writing? Or was it a form of therapy?

Sharma: You know, I feel lucky that Mike was so supportive of my writing poetry. He was always trying to make room for it even as we were in a caregiving situation. But I wanted to document my time with him, too. I see poetry as a record, and that it has a dailiness to it that is sacred.

Q: I’m often surprised at how many young people have suffered losses, a parent or a friend. Does sharing your experience bring out things the students may not have fully expressed before?

Sharma: Yes, students have disclosed to me personal loss, and what I hope to do is just to make them feel supported as best that I can. We think about the tradition of the elegy, the eulogy, the ode. We think about poetic forms as holding so much for them.

John Pennington teaches beginner dance students

Q: Several of you have mentioned the idea of a safe place to create, a safe place for students to be in general. John, tell us your thoughts on that.

Pennington: When I am teaching beginners, I know I have to eliminate the fear of them thinking that I’m going to make them dance. That wall is up immediately because they hear “dance” or “movement” and say, “I’m not a dancer.” But the feedback and what they tell other students is that this class is very safe. I know what that means.

I get at beginners through problem-solving, and part of that is improvisation. One of the first exercises is to walk anywhere in the room and then sometimes I guide them and tell them to change directions. Can you walk at a different level? Can you walk high or low? And already we’re addressing part of the art form, and that is space design, motion design and floor design.

You put limitations on that creativity, or what can get produced within that problem-solving. Because what happens in any art form, when you tell people, “Just go do anything you want,” it is frightening. You need entry points and guardrails, and you need to know where you’re headed. Hopefully that becomes something that’s embodied in the students so that they say, “What if I went up or down, or did a turn here?” We’re trying to put a language to movement and identify some of those movements so that they have a toolbox. During the semester, they get more and more comfortable. They know that I’m not going to ask them to put their leg up over their ears.

Q: I’m hearing again and again about safety, community, collaboration. Esther, you’re the co-founder of a group called Tertulia Feminista Magaly Pineda, a monthly gathering of Dominican feminists and activists, and you’re also involved with the work of Josefina Báez, a Dominican artist in multiple genres who developed a method she calls “performance autology.”

Hernández-Medina: Performance autology is a way to harness your creativity in whichever way you express it. It might be as an artist, but it might be as an intellectual or an activist. The output is different, but you are still creating something.

[Báez] also emphasizes that you are creating a work of art with your life, and that includes taking care of your health and taking care of yourself while doing art. Part of the reason she founded the group was because she was very concerned about the fact that many artists are socialized to believe that they should do art despite themselves. It’s this whole myth about having to be the tortured artist to actually be able to create. And she was like, “No, no, it’s the opposite. You need to take care of yourself, so that your art is sustainable, and so that your life is sustainable.”

Michael O’Malley at Chan Gallery during the closing reception of his exhibition.

O’Malley’s “Headless Object” Exhibit

A Professor of Art at Pomona, Michael O’Malley has focused his work on engaging the aesthetics and conventions that shape the built environment. His winter exhibit at the Chan Gallery reflects his belief in art as agency—that we all create from a position in which we “make choices and exert control over the material world.”

 

My exhibit tests out the possibility that, like objects, I am more akin to process: emerging, changing, disappearing. The ‘exhibition’ changes each day. Sometimes a new form is added. Other times a rearranging or a removal. Arrangements of flowers echo this continuum of change as a practice of engagement and witness.”

Q: Jane, what about teaching science students to think creatively and in
a safe environment?

Lane Liu in her laboratory

Liu: I still am figuring that out, because if you’re just saying, “Just do whatever you think of,” that could cause an explosion.

I think one of the challenges in science is you have to be able to understand some fundamental information first or know how to carry out some techniques. So there is a little bit of, “Know these facts; know how to carry out this protocol,” where I don’t think there’s a ton of creativity there. But you need that first stage to then be able to say, “Now just let your mind wander and be open.” Once you have a foundation, you can start thinking about creativity.

Q: I’m reminded that there is creativity in business, too. Besides being a full-time chemistry professor, Jane, you’re the co-founder of an early-stage startup, BRT Biotechnologies, in the area of drug discovery.

Liu: We are making a very specific class of small molecules called macrocycles. We’re trying to make large collections of these macrocycles to then sell to a pharmaceutical company or another biotech company, so that they can then find the next big thing.

Just being able to talk about and share the vision with others is a very creative process. There’s that 30-second elevator pitch and there’s that 20-minute deep dive you might prepare. There’s the website you might put together. There are all of these different audiences. And it’s constantly this creative process of, “How do I talk about what we’re doing in a way that gets other people excited or understanding what I’m feeling and understanding?” No one thing works. It’s a different sort of pitch if I’m talking to someone who has a background in biotech startups, versus someone who’s just excited about the science., versus someone who has no idea about small-molecule drug discovery,  versus someone who really just wants to know about the return on investment.

Q: Let’s close with a question about everyday creativity. There was a recent book by music producer Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, that was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. You don’t end up on the bestseller list for weeks and weeks because only artists are interested. Is that something you all believe—that everyone, not just the artist, is a creative being?

Pennington: I absolutely do. How do we get through the world without creativity? It’s about acknowledging it and giving yourself time to honor it. I don’t think many people who have been on one track their whole life have given themselves time. You know where it happens? It happens in retirement. All the hostels, all the painting classes, because they didn’t have time or they didn’t think they had time. You look at The New York Times bestsellers, there will be a book about creativity almost every year.

I do believe that everyone is creative, and that there are acts you can take every day. It’s about a moment in improvisation, about a different decision. It’s as simple as driving home a different way and seeing something new. It’s going to call upon a new response in the brain and challenge your senses. It’s stopping and allowing room for something else.

Serena Lin ’25

With Uplift Notes, this Sagehen wants to counter isolation for seniors—and maybe even slow the progression of Alzheimer’s.

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Connection? There’s An App For That

How Neuroscience Research Can Inform Intergenerational Conversation

By Lorraine Wu Harry ’97

In an age of pervasive social isolation, Serena Lin ’25 thinks that cultivating connection through conversation is something that’s still very much in the cards.

Her cards are called “Uplift Notes,” and she’s sold more than 200 boxes of them. A neuroscience major, she tested her deck on several hundred people of all ages, with a particular focus on bridging the generational gap between young adults and senior citizens, a group particularly susceptible to isolation and loneliness.

At Pomona, Lin studies Alzheimer’s disease, which has afflicted both her late great-grandfather and her great-aunt. She says that her work has helped her realize that Alzheimer’s treatment is not just about diet and medication, but social engagement.

During her sophomore year, Lin enrolled in a human-centered design course at The Hive, a design center at The Claremont Colleges (see sidebar on page 24). This class, and the mentorship of Hive executive director Fred Leichter, provided the support to create Uplift Notes to help facilitate more social interaction.

To develop the product, Lin consulted with several neuroscience faculty and alumni experts who gave her insights on the complexity of Alzheimer’s, including her thesis advisor and Assistant Professor Jonathan King, Professor Karen Parfitt and Daniel Gibbs ’73, author of A Tattoo on my Brain: A Neurologist’s Personal Battle against Alzheimer’s Disease. Her ongoing testing of the game has included working with Lyn Juckniess ’74 at Pilgrim Place, a retirement community in Claremont. Uplift Notes also has been used at Pomona’s Alumni Weekend and Bridging the Gap, a program Lin participated in that addresses religious and political polarization.

Uplift Notes game by Serena Lin ’25

Lin is now working on a version of the toolbox specifically for individuals with neurological challenges such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. The 2.0 edition is part of what’s driving her senior thesis on social engagement for Alzheimer’s patients, with a focus on trying to reduce feelings of anxiety and loneliness.

Her ultimate desire is to get the toolbox into the hands of as many Alzheimer’s support groups, hospitals and senior centers as possible. But she also hopes that people of all ages and backgrounds will make use of Uplift Notes as a social engagement tool that’s “good for your well-being, longevity and brain health.”

 

Don Daglow ’74 has earned much acclaim and multiple awards—including an Emmy—for designing some of the earliest video games in a range of different genres, including arguably the world’s first role-playing game (RPG),✱ the first world-building game, and the first graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).✱ Indeed, you can draw a straight line between many of his contributions and blockbuster games like “Roblox,”✱ “Grand Theft Auto”✱ and “Minecraft”✱ that help fuel an industry that rakes in nearly $200 billion in annual sales.

This spring Daglow jumps onto the SageCast podcast for a wide-ranging conversation with  Pomona Associate Professor of Computer Science Joe Osborn, who—in addition to having an MFA in game design—conducts research on artificial intelligence and its impact on interactive systems like video games.

Osborn spoke with Daglow about some of the design pioneer’s favorite projects and how the medium has evolved to become a catalyst of creativity for hundreds of millions of people around the globe.

(Please note that this interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Osborn: Before you got to Pomona, what were some of the earliest experiences that felt “creative” for you?

Daglow: My original goal when I was in sixth or seventh grade was to be a writer, then a novelist, then a playwright. In high school I was writing plays and had some things performed, and was very much set on that goal, so when I came to Pomona I already had a vision of wanting to do something in theatre. As a sophomore I saw a really innovative production of “The Taming of the Shrew” that just made my head explode in terms of what theatre could be.

Osborn: In the last couple of decades there’s been a bit of a moral panic around video games—some educators, parents and members of Congress believe that they stifle creativity and that kids spend too much time in front of the screen and can’t think or imagine things for themselves. How do you feel that video games can inspire creativity in yourself and others?

Daglow: There’s no question that games can inspire creativity in the same way that great writing can. When I was a kid I read Dr. Seuss books and then started writing my own, styled after [him]. I grew up in a family where I was very loved, but also where it got very loud and combative, so retiring away to books and games was part of my defense against the world. It’s a place you can go that can give you comfort and perspective, and open up great wide vistas.

Osborn: This makes me think about some of the specific sources of inspiration you’ve drawn from in your work, including “Dungeons and Dragons” (D&D)✱—also the subject of moral panic in the ’70s and ’80s. What inspired your interest and embarking on the project of making a “D&D” game while at Pomona?

Daglow: I started out making games by chance. At the time computers were really only accessible to faculty and upperclass students majoring in math and the sciences. But in 1971 [Math Professor] Paul Yale and Jim Cowart ’73 got a grant from the Sloan Foundation and put two computer terminals in the lobby of Mudd-Blaisdell. One morning I walked in and heard the terminals making a clickity-clack kind of sound, and [the folks there] said, “Oh, hi! Want to learn how to use the computer?” You could interact with and play games on it, which [I loved] as a theatre person.

So, before “D&D” came along, I’d been writing games—and plays—at Pomona for several years. For my senior play, Pomona theatre majors had other projects they were committed to, so I had actors join from “Strut and fret” at the other five colleges. Fast forward a year after we graduate, and these actors have fallen in love with this new “D&D” game, and I got a call one day to play. I go, and my brain just explodes [thinking about] all the things this could be. At that point, it wasn’t that I wanted to write the “Dungeon” game. It was that I couldn’t not write it.

Osborn: There’s a lot of energy right now around large language models✱ (LLMs), but they make content in a very different way from the interactive fiction✱ of the past. How do you feel that [LLMs] compare to the kind of stuff people were doing on computers in the 1980s?

Daglow: I’ve got a fair amount of experience with LLMs, and it’s really apples and oranges. When I was learning to program at Pomona, I actually wrote an early chatbot✱ called ECALA. I treated it like a game [of] trying to fool the player into thinking they’re talking to a real person—and what LLMs do is allow the computer to fool the player much longer than we could. Ask [an LLM] to write a 500-word story … and you can see the standard story-beats it’s trying to recreate. But it feels like it was written by a human being who’s way too self-important and trying too hard.

Compared to what we had 50 years ago, [AI today is] a hell of an accomplishment, and there are certain ways in which it’s been a useful tool that can save a lot of time for people. I think there have been some good examples of games that have been enhanced by AI: if it’s done selectively, you can get some very nice “non-playable character”✱ interactions that add more depth. The problem is business people start thinking that you can take that good idea being dropped into places selectively and start saying “what if I put it everywhere?” And that’s not really how it works. Ultimately the chemistry that goes into human creativity is different, but we should expect machine creativity to continue to improve.

Osborn: There’s always that tension of whether thought prefigures language or language prefigures thought. In the ’70s and ’80s the former paradigm was dominant, and now we’re in a world where it seems like many people
believe that a language machine also knows and understands things. It’s an
interesting debate.

Daglow: This makes me think of my playwrighting advisor Steve Young. He would always say that passion and emotion are what drive our lives and, therefore, our stories. Language and expression is how we as individuals take our emotional experiences and translate that into something that registers with someone else.

He would say, “Give somebody an idea, and maybe they’ll remember it until Monday, but make somebody feel an emotion, and they can’t help but remember it on Monday.” In fact, maybe they can’t stop thinking about it for weeks, months or even years. If you think about movies that hit you hard, or a book that changed how you look at things, that’s because the emotion was translated into language, which conveyed the power and the relevance to an individual. In 50-plus years of leading teams and producing video games of all kinds, that perspective has helped almost every single day of my career, which is why I feel such gratitude to Dr. Young. What a gift.

A brief history of consoles

* Years represent  U.S. release dates

Atari 2600, 1977

As one of the first systems with interchangeable cartridges that let you play more than one game, made the medium viable for home use (Units sold: 30M+)

Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Game Boy

Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), 1983

Alongside its 1991 sequel SuperNES, played a key role in kick-starting gaming, with its directional “D-pad” becoming widely adopted by other platforms (Units sold: 62M)

Nintendo Game Boy, 1989

Ushered in the birth of the portable gaming device (Units sold: 119M)

Sony PlayStation and PlayStation 2

Sony PlayStation, 1994

Introduced 3D graphics and CD-quality sound, as well as more narrative-driven titles (Units sold: 102M)

Sony PlayStation 2, 2000

Popularized the idea of consoles as entertainment hubs, with a DVD player and internet collectivity (Units sold: 160M)

Nintendo Wii and Switch

Nintendo Wii, 2006

Spearheaded the gesture-based interface, spurring further research in augmented reality and virtual reality (Units sold: 101M)

Nintendo Switch, 2017

Revolutionized the “hybrid console” both for portability and home systems (Units sold: 146M)

Roots of Utopia

Published eight years before “SimCity,” “Utopia” was developed for Mattel’s 1979 Intellivision console and later recognized by Guinness World Records as the first simulation video game.

Osborn: You can view “Utopia” as a “building” toy—as a way to make little worlds. Kids have played with building toys for millennia. Games like “Minecraft” have over 40 million monthly users who play seven-plus hours a week. (My own son is among them, and I think he’s pulling up the average.) What does this explosion of interest in world-building games✱ say to you about what people are interested in engaging with, and what do you know about how different people have used these games in different ways?

Daglow: It’s a great example of the power of video games, to take established kinds of toys and expand them. When I was a kid I played with my dad’s old Erector set, and then Kenner’s [Girder and Panel] building set, which was basically plastic pizzas that you could fit together to build buildings and bridges with. It’s that continuation of [the idea that] building things is fun.

Just this idea of “what if” is so fascinating: if I do this, what will happen? We face that in real life all the time. If I have the doughnuts for dinner, instead of something with protein and vitamins, what will happen? “Well, I have a good idea, so I think I should have the protein.” That’s a constructive part of our lives—and I think video games have just made that explode in wonderful ways.

Osborn: There’s also a vein of world-building games where [users] are making the actual rules and encounters. When you were producing “Adventure Construction Set” and “Racing Destruction Set,” what led you to think that these would be interesting in the market, rather than just be tools for game developers?

Daglow: When I joined Electronic Arts (EA) in late 1983, I was teamed up with Stuart Smith, who EA had signed to do another mythological adventure game [“Rivers of Light”] that he had already created and that they had already signed off on. We were talking about his project, and he said that what he had really wanted to do was something like “Adventure Construction Set.” This was aligned with what I had in mind: going back to when I wrote “Dungeon” on the mainframe at CGU, I was thinking “how can we fill all this space [in a game] without having to author everything individually?”

I went back to EA CEO Trip Hawkins and said, “I want to change the game that you all approved.” I was naive and new in the process, coming from this big corporation Mattel to what was then this little startup (EA), I didn’t realize that when you do something like that, you might get the game uncreated. But we made our pitch [to EA] to let people build their own adventures. Stuart would do the adventure game he was planning to do, but he’d build it with this ‘construction set,’ and then we’d have another tutorial adventure that’ll show you all the other things you can do with the game.

Osborn: From a user-creativity perspective, do you have experiences of how people have played world-building games like “Neverwinter Nights” and “Utopia” that have surprised you—ways that players’ creativity has taken you off-guard?

Daglow: Yes! It happens enough that we have an industry term for that: emergent gameplay. People play with our games in ways we never ever could have imagined. I would say that “Neverwinter Nights” is not about writing a story, it’s about the set design. You’re creating a world in which other people can play, and people will think of things you never would have thought of.

[Even] the idea that they would form communities—there are still people today playing the [19]90s versions of “Neverwinter Nights” from AOL, in some cases with people who they’ve been playing with for 35 years. There are groups on social media that I can go visit where these people still get together. Through the community they’ve created a world that’s infinitely bigger and longer-lasting than anything I ever created. If you provide a grain of sand and it builds into something like that over time, it’s just incredibly inspiring.

It can be different ways to play, it can be communities built on top of games, it can be completely new games designed using the same old tools and ways you would never expect. It’s one of the wonderful parts of doing game design, to see amazing things [done] not by professional game designers, but by a high school kid in New Orleans, or a medical assistant in Dubuque. They will come up with these brilliant, creative, innovative twists. It’s just so much fun to see.

It’s a Friday afternoon in the middle of January, and Tunji Balogun ’04 is multi-tasking. He has one hand on the wheel of his car and a Zoom call going on his phone, as he navigates to a local In-N-Out Burger for his first real meal of the day. His schedule as the CEO and chairman of Def Jam Recordings does this, sometimes: keeps him busy enough that he can’t fit in lunch until after 3 p.m.

On this particular Friday, though, Los Angeles is still reeling from the spate of wildfires that have burned up tens of thousands of acres of land across the county. The sky is blue, but you can still taste the ash in the air. So as he drives, Balogun is reflecting on his place in the order of things: what it means to dedicate your life and career to creativity when the world is quite literally burning around you.

“I would say I’ve dedicated my career to trying to uplift forward-thinking, cutting-edge artists making Black music,” he says. To him, Black music is a loose and expansive category that cuts across genres, encompassing dance, R&B and pop as well as dancehall, reggae and hip-hop.

Balogun says that the fires that surround his city bring his vision of the power of art into clear focus. “In a chaotic, wild world, people need healthy forms of escape,” he says. “Music is one of humanity’s creations that brings us closer together [and] serves as a healing force. My approach has been to try to do my part and leave a legacy that I can be proud of.”
He’s done plenty of legacy-building in the first decade of his career. Since his first internship at Warner Records, which Balogun landed while still at Pomona, he’s helped launch the careers of artists including Kendrick Lamar, Khalid, Bryson Tiller, Doja Cat and SZA. Now his role at Def Jam means he’s in charge of shepherding the work of hip-hop luminaries such as LL Cool J and Public Enemy’s Chuck D as well as newcomers like Elmiene, who Balogun says has “one of the best voices I’ve heard in my life.”

But becoming one of music’s most influential tastemakers wasn’t the plan when he first got into the business. During that Warner internship, Balogun wasn’t thinking about eventually elevating into the executive suite—he wanted to learn the ropes in order to break through himself as a rapper.

But as soon as he got into the boardroom, Balogun realized that most of the other people there were business majors, not music obsessives. He, on the other hand, was already scouring the internet for up-and-coming acts at a time when that wasn’t yet common. He had an enthusiast’s deep-rooted knowledge combined with a fan’s earnest love of the work. And as Balogun surveyed the landscape around him, it became clear that he probably could have a bigger impact helping facilitate others’ careers than narrowly focusing on his own.

He felt like his liberal arts background made him particularly well-suited to the task. “I’m a studious, well-educated Nigerian-American kid who went to schools like Deerfield and Pomona,” he says now. “I’ve always kind of had dual citizenship. I’m in the creative community, but I also can go into board meetings and talk about quarterly finance projections.” That flexibility made him an ideal “translator” between corporate and creative.

He also felt a responsibility as a Black man in an industry that has historically exploited Black artists. “Something I noticed when I got my first internship was [that] there are a lot of artists who look like me, but not a lot of executives,” he recalls. “So there’s always been a goal in the back of my head to be an advocate and a strong voice for people who don’t really have a lot of people advocating for them.”

He’s been able to do that for many artists over the years—but often at the cost of his own creative pursuits. Dedicating himself to his job means that Balogun rarely makes his own music anymore. So he scratches that particular itch by collaborating with the artists he signs. It doesn’t always happen—Balogun never wants to insert his opinion where it’s not welcome. But “there are artists who I get really close with, and there would be a level of comfort where they knew that I made music, and then I could contribute as a songwriter,” Balogun says.

Sometimes that goes far enough that he earns an official songwriting credit, as he did on K CAMP’s double-platinum hit “Comfortable.” But more often he’s just in the studio spitballing, being part of the give-and-take of making something new. “Most of the time I won’t ask for or take credit,” Balogun acknowledges. “You’re my artist. If you win, I win.”

After his time at Warner Brothers, Balogun found his way to A&R Interscope, and moved from there to RCA, he went on what he calls “a special run of signings,” hooking up with artists including SZA, Childish Gambino and H.E.R. He went on to start his own label, Keep Cool, in 2018. That work earned him the chance to come aboard at Def Jam in 2022.

The idea scared him at first. He had a good thing going where he was, and the idea of taking on more responsibility—particularly on the business side—was intimidating. But ultimately Balogun opted into the opportunity to put his imprint on such a storied label. “Def Jam is one of the last labels that has a mandate to uphold Black music,” he says. “I just felt like I was being called to do the role. Spiritually it’s kind of what I’ve been trying to do this whole time.”

That transition also thrust Balogun from a largely behind-the-scenes role at RCA into a very bright spotlight at Def Jam. “RCA is an amazing label, and I had a great time working there, but no one’s checking that it is living up to the culture of what it’s supposed to be,” he says. “Things at Def Jam are scrutinized. People are checking to see the types of signings I’m making. I appreciate the accountability of it.”

The scrutiny remains intense, but he’s also come to appreciate the pressure. It reminds him of just how much Def Jam’s work matters to people, and the importance of continuous self-growth. “I tell my artists [that] you can’t get comfortable and think nothing’s going to change, because you blink and everything has shifted,” he says. “You have to remain hungry and uncomfortable in order to evolve.”

In addition to the specific pressure of life at Def Jam, Balogun also has to weather the storms of a business model that’s trying to figure out where it stands as album sales figures slump and races for TikTok virality reign. But he insists that he’s not one to chase trends, instead relying on finding good artists who make interesting work, and being patient in helping them find their audience. “I want to work with people who are staunchly themselves, no matter the platform,” Balogun says. “And then they figure out, ‘OK, how do I be myself on this new platform, as opposed to [changing] myself to fit the platform?’”

To that end, he’s less interested in digital dominance and more focused on finding fans wherever they are. “In music right now, success happens when creativity meets community,” he says. “If an artist can actually galvanize people who care about what they’re doing, those people become the ambassadors for their songs, for their albums, for their shows. They help spread your music. They put it on their stories, they run your fan accounts. You usually have to start small, but I find that most of the people who are successful in this era understand that it’s not about reaching the masses first. It’s about cultivating your own little world and double, triple, quadrupling down on it.”

As an example of this kind of fandom-building, Balogun points to rapper Doja Cat, who—long before the pandemic inspired many musicians to perform directly for fans online—was streaming on Instagram Live two or three times a week and making songs in her bedroom. “She really did build a bulletproof community of people who will never leave her, and then layered bigger and bigger songs on top of that.” he says.

It’s clear that as much as Balogun understands a balance sheet, everything he does comes from a deep-rooted passion for music and creativity. But even the hottest passions can burn out, especially when you have to engage with them in a professional setting, day after day. How does he keep the spark alive?

“I have to constantly revert to ‘Tunji the fan,’ and remember that, while all the industry stuff is cool, at the end of the day it’s really about the artist and the fan,” he says. “I have to remind myself not to overthink it. You won’t get burnt out [if] you actually love the stuff that you’re working on.”

When the non-music parts of the job threaten to take over, Balogun makes sure to follow up long days in the office with long nights in his studio staying on top of the latest themes and explorations in music. Some of his breakout picks from his current crop of artists at Def Jam include R&B singer Muni Long and Fridayy, who Balogun describes as a “hybrid artist” mixing R&B, Afrobeat and gospel. He’s also excited about Coco Jones, as well as LiAngelo Ball, whose brothers Lonzo and LaMelo are both NBA players. “He’s gonna have one of the best years in hip-hop,” Balogun predicts.

At this point in our conversation, Balogun has long since picked up his In-N-Out Burger; it’s cooling in the car next to him. More calls are coming through, and texts about an artist’s song leaking. It’s time for him to return to his work: the creative part, the corporate part, all of it. He’s tired, but he seems certain that he’ll be able to keep his compass pointed north, so to speak, even as he faces the challenges of a difficult job in an uncertain industry.

“I’ve been a fan, I’ve been an artist, I’ve been an executive, and all of those different experiences have informed my approach,” Balogun says. “Deep down, I’m still a fan, and still an artist. I’m not putting music together or making records or anything, but I think I have the heart and the soul of an artist.”

Mac Marnett ’04 (photo by Chris Black)

By his senior year at Pomona, Mac Barnett ’04 knew what kind of stories captivated children.

What he didn’t know was how to write them.

Barnett, an English major fascinated by complex poetry and other pieces of fiction, spent his college summers as a camp counselor in Berkeley, California, reading to preschoolers. One book in particular, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka, kindled Barnett’s love for children’s literature.

“I thought, ‘This is the kind of thing I love and that I study, but these 4-year-olds aren’t going to get it,’” Barnett recalls. “But when I read this book to them, they were getting the most sophisticated jokes. That’s when I figured out that kids were the best audience for the kind of stories that I liked.”

Impassioned his senior year to write for children, Barnett convinced the late author and Pomona Professor David Foster Wallace to let him into his creative writing class. On top of challenging his students to shed their writing habits, Barnett says, Wallace underscored the importance of the writer-reader relationship.

“He had such a focus on taking care of the reader,” Barnett recalls. “Him explaining how you, at a desk alone in a room, should have your audience in mind and consider how a sentence or plot twist is going over with the reader—it just made so much sense, especially for picture books, which are usually read out loud to kids. Consider the adult reading and the kid listening.”

Twenty years after graduating from Pomona, Barnett has written more than 60 books for children and won myriad awards.

In February, The New York Times best-selling author was appointed the ninth National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress. During his two-year term, Barnett will travel the country championing children’s picture books as a quintessential American art form.

“Taking children’s books seriously requires us to take children seriously,” he says. “Children are misunderstood, overlooked, dismissed, not listened to—and really caring about the books they read requires us to see them for who they really are [as] dimensional human beings who feel deeply and think in interesting and complicated ways.”

Learning how to think

Barnett wanted to be a writer long before leaving the Bay Area for Pomona in the early 2000s.

He started writing poetry in middle school, then plays and novels as he got older. At Pomona, he wrote sketch comedy and developed an interest in journalism and nonfiction that he once thought would turn into a future in academic writing.

As Barnett pondered his career prospects, he says Pomona professors like Paul Saint-Amour encouraged him to be skeptical, thoughtful and curious.

“Pomona taught me how to think from different perspectives, to look at problems in different ways, to let go of certainty, which I think is often the enemy of literature,” Barnett adds. “I would be a much less interesting writer if I hadn’t gone to Pomona.”

One day his senior year, Barnett mentioned to a Pitzer College friend that in the summer he’d discovered the book Stinky Cheese Man while at camp. The friend was Scieszka’s daughter, who introduced Barnett to her father shortly thereafter.

In 2008, Scieszka was named the first National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. A year later, Scieszka helped Barnett publish his first book, Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem.

Barnett says that, when he left Pomona, he told himself he would take a year and try to write a picture book. If it didn’t work out, he would go back to get a Ph.D. somewhere.

“Even when I got my third book published,” he says, “I didn’t think writing would be a career.”

Mac Barnett ’04, seen here at his inauguration as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, draws inspiration from art, music and theatre, and incorporates the complexities of those mediums into his stories. 
(Shawn Miller/Library of Congress)

Writing for young readers

Barnett learned early in his career to listen to children.

Writing for kids and adults is similar, he says, in that both appreciate the great themes of literature—love, jealousy, betrayal, discovery. Barnett hit his stride as an author when he started focusing on concerns children have and asking young readers questions rather than answering them.

In 2017, Barnett published The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse—the picture book he says epitomizes his approach to writing.

“What’s powerful about picture books is that they can go very deep very fast,” he says. “It’s a short form of literature—32 pages, sometimes 40—and not a lot of words per page. But it can get to some of life’s deepest questions, and I feel I did that [with The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse].”

Barnett draws inspiration from art, music and theatre, and incorporates the complexities of those creative mediums into his stories. He says that, because children tend to be insulated from much of the world, children’s books tend to feel cloistered from the rest of literary culture—but that the best ones are sophisticated, thought-provoking and challenging.

“As adults, when we encounter something we don’t understand, we often push it aside because it makes us feel stupid,” he says. “But kids just bravely charge into challenging texts. It’s really inspiring to watch.”

With more than 5 million copies sold and a stop-motion animated series on Apple TV+ based on his and co-creator Jon Klassen’s Shapes series of picture books, Barnett recognizes the responsibility he has in writing for a time in a young reader’s life.

As National Ambassador, he has the platform to enlighten adults on the power of children’s books and the brilliance of the kids who read them. He says that he appreciates living in the space of early childhood, likening it to a train station where kids are constantly passing through.

“I’m sitting there [with my] violin … [trying] to play them a beautiful piece of music that makes sense in that moment,” he says. “Maybe they’ll remember the tune when they get where they’re going, but even if they don’t, all that matters is that I played a good piece while they were there.”

Growing up as a Boston Red Sox fan, Melissa Hooke ’19 never imagined herself celebrating a championship at Yankee Stadium. Yet there she was, cheering as the “Commissioner’s Trophy” was raised into a beautiful October night sky in the Bronx. Hooke, a senior quantitative analyst with the Los Angeles Dodgers, had just become a World Series champion.

Strangely enough, baseball wasn’t even her second favorite sport growing up. Hooke was recruited for basketball but also played soccer at Pomona. “I was looking at small liberal arts schools in New England, then visited Pomona and fell in love with campus,” she says. “Last minute, before early decision deadlines, I applied.”

She played midfield in soccer and guard in basketball, sometimes juggling both seasons. “Especially with our [soccer] team—we made the NCAA tournament a couple of times, so I’d join basketball midseason and have to catch up fast.”

Though an accomplished athlete, Hooke prioritized academics. “For me, it was always school first and then sports as an add-on.”

Like many incoming first years, Hooke wasn’t sure what she wanted to major in at Pomona, but after taking math and psychology courses, she ultimately declared as a math major.

“It was really my junior fall semester when I took a class with Jo Hardin [that] I decided that I really did love math and that there were career paths that attracted me,” she says.

Hooke’s time in the math department also brought her in contact with Associate Professor Gabe Chandler, a former Sagehens baseball coach who built an impressive pipeline to Major League Baseball—not for athletes, but for data analysts. Alongside his colleagues, Chandler has seen a remarkable number of graduates land roles in professional baseball analytics. Though he became Hooke’s thesis advisor, he never pushed her toward the sport.

“I don’t think I ever mentioned working in baseball, other than [sharing that] such career paths exist, as we’ve had a lot of alumni working in that space,” Chandler says.

Hooke and Chandler’s connection extended beyond academics. Athletics took a backseat for Hooke after knee injuries ended her college career, but she joined Chandler’s intramural basketball team, “which made a deep run in the playoffs, with Melissa hitting at least one game-winner,” Chandler recalls.

Academically, Hooke thrived under Chandler’s mentorship, earning Best Paper at the 2020 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Aerospace Conference for her thesis on Bayesian modeling.

A junior-year internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology introduced Hooke to aerospace analytics, leading to a full-time offer before her graduation in 2019. While her foray into aerospace wasn’t necessarily expected, the position fit like a glove.

“I was working on early mission concepts and designs,” Hooke says. “Basically, they’d come up with some crazy idea and say, ‘we want to fly a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere and figure out what the composition is. And we want to fly these four science instruments.’ I would help the team come up with that architecture and estimate the cost based on previously flown historical NASA missions.”

Hooke spent five years at JPL, enjoying the space industry before an opportunity with the Dodgers emerged: A former JPL colleague working for the Dodgers and aware of her sports background sent her a job listing and “wouldn’t let [her] get away with not applying.”

Hooke started with the Dodgers near the end of the 2023 season, just as the team finished with the third-best regular-season record, only to be eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Heading into 2024, expectations were high.

Among Hooke’s duties as part of the 2023-24 analytics team: crunching the numbers to evaluate effectiveness of pitchers lower in the Dodgers’ depth chart.

“I think this year was a challenging year for the Dodgers, in some ways, with all the expectations. Obviously, the team dealt with a lot of injuries. And as an analytics department, we had experienced a few disappointing seasons leading up to this. So, going into the playoffs, there’s a lot of angst in the office. People are really nervous. A lot of people are too nervous to watch the games.”

Hooke’s Dodgers job is about removing emotions from decision-making in areas
such as player evaluation, game strategy and team management. She primarily works on pitcher evaluation.

“Math has pushed the game of baseball forward. As we get more data, we’re able to uncover more about why certain players are good,” she explains. “For pitching mechanics, we track pitcher movement, and teams can use that data to extract information about delivery mechanics—when a delivery leads to better outcomes, worse outcomes or even injury. That’s how we’re helping teams move forward.”

While analytics can clash with instinct and tradition, Hooke sees growing acceptance of its role.

“At the Dodgers, the coaches [and] executives really buy into it,” she says. “We have a culture of accepting it, and that trickles down to the players.”

That buy-in led to another successful regular season as the Dodgers finished with the best record in the MLB. But injuries left their pitching staff short-handed in the postseason. Part of Hooke’s job was to identify pitchers in the lower ranks who could contribute to a World Series-winning team.

Melissa Hooke ’19 at Dodgers–Yankees game in New York.

The Dodgers made it to the World Series, and Hooke found herself on a team-chartered plane heading to New York. After falling behind 5-0 in Game 5, she recalled the team’s resolve.

“I think we kind of just said ‘well, we’ll get it done in L.A.’ And then, as the fifth inning progressed and we started coming back, we said ‘let’s just finish this off.’”

The Dodgers did finish it off, winning 7-6, and Hooke became a World Series champion.

“It was a bit of relief, but also just pent-up from the last few years,” she says. “Having a disappointing postseason ending before, everyone expected us to [disappoint again]. It was a celebration. It was different being in New York, but I’m glad that we were because it just tied together that magical experience.”

After college Desiree (Golen) Wicht ’08 created a bestselling Tetris app, launched a pop-up restaurant startup, scrubbed the decks of John Kerry’s $100 million yacht and then quit the landlocked life entirely in 2014 when, within three months of meeting her partner Jordan Wicht, she decided to travel the globe in a 50-year-old, 30-foot sailboat—having never before hoisted a single jib.

Over the last decade the Wichts have cataloged the trials and tribulations of boat life through weekly YouTube videos as “Project Atticus,” with roughly 300,000 subscribers following their adventures doing everything from spearing hogfish in Belize, to fleeing Turkish warships, to spending the pandemic off-grid in Panama, to giving birth to their daughter Isabella on the island of Malta.

“We went on this adventure because we wanted the freedom to be able to go anywhere from the comfort of our economical, sustainable, floating home,” Desiree says. “As the tiny-home mantra goes, ‘the world gets a lot bigger when you’re living small.’”

Desiree (Golen) Wicht ’08 and her husband Jordan Wicht spent more than half of the last decade on their 30-foot sailboat Atticus, braving hurricanes, Turkish warships and even pirates.

Along the way, Desiree transformed from a 20-something who’d never touched a screwdriver, to a seasoned seafarer bartering her boat-repair skills for groceries. She and Jordan had to wear an array of hats ranging from carpentry to amateur meteorology, all while dealing with unusual professional hazards like running out of water and evading Honduran pirates. (The team bootstrapped the 10-year project via merchandise sales, video sponsors, several side hustles and thousands of annual donations from followers on YouTube and Patreon.)

“We operated on the adage that, in 20 years, we’d likely be more disappointed by the things that we didn’t do than by the things we did,” says Desiree.

Desiree (Golen) Wicht ’08 on bow of Atticus sailboat

As of this fall, the Wichts have returned to solid ground—a decision brought about by the imminent birth of their second daughter Scarlett in January of 2025. After a few months exploring different areas of Appalachia, the couple decided to settle in Bryson City, North Carolina, nestled in the Smoky Mountains—and they continue to film and release weekly videos as they build a mountain homestead DIY-style. While Desiree has no regrets about their time on the water, she says that she’s very happy to be back on dry land for this next chapter of life.

“I always thought of myself as a traveler who needed to see and experience the world to feel fulfilled,” she says.“But what surprised me the most about our travels is that after a while I started to really understand how special my own home, my own family, and my own country is to me. Now I’m excited to make roots, without feeling like I’m missing out on what’s ‘out there’ anymore.”