Blog Articles

Inside Out

March 4, 2020 by Robyn Norwood Comments Off

BEHIND FENCES TOPPED with razor-sharp wire, students from the 5Cs sit next to incarcerated students each semester in classes taught by Claremont Colleges professors at the California state prison in Norco.

They are part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange program, an international effort introduced locally by Pitzer College in 2014 and expanded in 2018 to include courses from Pomona College and the other 5Cs. The classes inside the 3,600-inmate California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) are part of the groundbreaking Inside-Out program created by Temple University Professor Lori Pompa in 1997—an effort that took ‘outside’ undergraduate students into classes with ‘inside’ students serving sentences in Pennsylvania prisons. Since then, it has expanded to more than 150 colleges and universities at some 200 jails and prisons.

Education isn’t the only goal of the college-credit classes; it’s also an attempt to create dialogue between groups with profound social differences. But the inside and outside students are equals in the classroom: They read the same materials, complete the same assignments, earn the same college credit and in small ways start to echo each other. As one incarcerated student in Professor Jo Hardin’s Math 57 class, Thinking with Data, writes:

In the future I hope to organize communities that focus on sustainable, environmentally beneficial practices. With the skills I learned in this class I feel prepared to communicate and interpret complex scientific data in ways that are easily understood and enjoyable to contemplate. Also by broadening my interactions with young scholars I’m exposed to the issues pertinent to the change makers of tomorrow.

Ultimately, the differences are stark. The outside students get to leave after class and return to a bus where their cell phones and lives await. The inside students at the medium-security men’s facility will eventually be eligible for release, but for now their lives are confined by both fences and regulations. They answered questions about the program in anonymous handwritten responses, including this one from a student in Linguistics 114, a course on language and discrimination taught by Nicole Holliday, an assistant professor of linguistics at Pomona:

I thought I would just be an outcast for the rest of my life, but my interactions with the outside students showed me that not everyone will judge me, and maybe I’ll get to find a place I fit into society after all.

And another student:

Being part of an “inside-out” class also makes me feel like a regular person, not an inmate. It is a welcome reprieve from the highly punitive correctional environment that I live in.

And another:

Being treated like a human and not a monster.

The buses leave The Claremont Colleges at 12:30 p.m. on the days of classes at the prison. Six courses were offered in fall 2019 and another half-dozen this spring, each meeting once a week. The students and professors must be cleared by prison security and undergo orientation, as well as being tested for tuberculosis before classes begin. They invest a full afternoon for one class, often returning to campus as late as 5:30. “Walking into the prison for the first time, it felt incredibly surreal,” says Pomona student Sarah Sundermeyer ’21. “But I think that feeling of trepidation dissipated as soon as we were inside the classroom with the other students. They were so warm and friendly and just open and willing to share in a way that I don’t know that I expected.”

An experience different from what they expected is a common refrain. “I guess it’s been more striking how unremarkable it is,” Hardin says. “You think, ’Oh, this is a really big deal.’ Everybody says it’s really impactful, and in some ways it has been. But in terms of the class structure and the class dynamics, it’s really just a class.”

“And that’s what you’re actually trying to do, right?” interjects Holliday. “Part of the innovation is treating people who are incarcerated like people—and that means treating them like students, for us.”

The courses are partly tailored for the setting, with Hardin’s data class focused on interpreting such information as census statistics and medical research, but also on the probabilities involved in DNA analysis of the sort used in criminal investigations and trials. Discussion is also an integral part of the model. “The topic was statistics and right off the bat people were saying, ‘I feel I’m reduced to a number in the system,’” says Ahana Ganguly ’21.

Holliday’s class examines linguistic prejudice in the educational system as well as the criminal justice system. “Every single inside student had a story about being told that they talked ‘ghetto’ or literally having the Spanish beaten out of them in school,” she says. “When people tell you your language doesn’t work because of their racism, you don’t use your language. And then what happens to you in school? It’s really, really powerful. And maybe in some small way, you know, what the program is trying to do is just restore a little bit of the dignity that they lost through the way they were treated in the educational system to begin with.”

Inside students earn course credits and a small amount of time off their sentences. Outside students earn credit and a first-person experience of a system most had considered only in theory.

“I think the greatest benefit actually—I hope—accrues to the larger society,” Holliday says. “What does a world look like when every judge, every lawyer, every politician has had a real human connection with someone that’s incarcerated? And we know our students go on to do wonderful things. They’re going to grad school; they’re going to law school; they’re going to be important and powerful. I want a generation of people that have had that experience and seen how fundamentally unfair our system is, that have the power to change it when they get out.”

Involvement in research or activism involving the criminal justice system is nothing new at The Claremont Colleges, with a decades-long tradition among many faculty, particularly at Pitzer. Pomona Professor of Religious Studies Erin Runions has facilitated writing workshops inside a women’s prison and teaches a popular course on Religion, Punishment and Restoration that is now part of the Inside-Out program.

But it was Pitzer’s Tessa Hicks Peterson—an associate professor of urban studies and assistant vice president of community engagement who also heads the Office of Consortial Academic Collaboration—who piloted the first Inside-Out course, Healing Arts and Social Change, which took place at CRC in the spring of 2014. Since then she has worked to spread this model to the other Claremont Colleges, with the support from the 7C Deans and many engaged faculty.

The expansion came with the support of a $1.1 million grant Pitzer received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2018 and is now run by Pitzer’s Tyee Griffith, founding manager of the Justice Education Initiative. In fall 2020, Pitzer will become the first Inside-Out program in the nation to offer a pathway to a bachelor’s degree for incarcerated students, who previously only have been able to earn associate’s degrees. The first class of incarcerated students to earn bachelor’s degrees in organizational studies from Pitzer would be in 2022.

All of these are complex issues, of course, involved in crime and punishment. Even on the Claremont campuses, a club called the 5C Prison Abolition Collective staged a panel last fall examining the ethics of Inside-Out that included formerly incarcerated speakers as well as Pomona’s Runions, a longtime activist and Inside-Out professor. Some who support the dismantling or reduction of the prison system over traditional reform contend that the Inside-Out program makes participants complicit with the system itself.

“There’s an idea that this ‘makes the prison look good,’” Peterson says. “But the prison is not necessarily pushing for this: We are really advocating for it on behalf of those inside who have asked us to do it. We’re there because we’re invited; we’re there because it’s their right to education, just like anyone else’s. And the educational experience is really transformative and does often provide a level of agency, like any educational experience does. That in and of itself is what we hope will change the system—both girding the folks inside with that sense of agency and education but also girding our 5C undergraduates with knowledge about this system, that for many people they have a luxury to not have to know and care what’s happening in these facilities that are state-run, that our tax dollars are going to. So we’re complicit with these institutions, regardless of whether we’re teaching inside or sitting here ignoring them. Those of us involved feel like we’d much rather be complicit with a solution of educating ourselves about these institutions so that we can become better advocates. Because certainly, you can’t teach inside without having resulting very strong feelings about the prison-industrial complex. It’s just impossible.”

The ideas a professor or student comes in with are not often the ones they leave with, says Darryl Yong, a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd who serves as faculty liaison for Inside-Out.

“It’s so black and white at first for many students,” he says. “Then when they see it and experience it, they realize it’s way more complicated than they could have possibly imagined. I think that complication is part of the learning. You learn by feeling squeezed in both worlds. Even the experience of having to walk through the gate, walk to our classroom, just being in the space, understanding what people are subjected to, it opens your eyes.”

Pomona students and others say they walk away changed.

“I love that idea that learning could provide an escape, and education could provide a kind of inner freedom for them and for us as well, as Claremont students,” Sundermeyer says.

Talking While Black

March 4, 2020 by Robyn Norwood Comments Off

SIMPLE TRAFFIC STOPS escalate, ending in unnecessary deaths. In courtrooms, justice is not always served. And in prisons, the voices of many of the incarcerated sound alike.

As a sociolinguist, Assistant Professor of Linguistics Nicole Holliday specializes in the study of how language and identity interact. More specifically, she focuses on the many implications of a central question: What does it mean to sound Black?

Holliday’s research on race and intonational variation examines wide aspects of society, including political speech. Yet there are few areas where the impact of race and linguistic differences is more stark than in the criminal justice system.

In just one example, in 2015 a college-educated African American woman named Sandra Bland was arrested in Texas after a minor traffic stop turned into a confrontation. Three days later, Bland died in jail in a suspicious death that was ruled a suicide.

After hearing the dash-cam audio of the incident, Holliday and fellow linguists Rachel Burdin and Joseph Tyler analyzed it and wrote an article, “Sandra Bland: Talking While Black,” that was published by Language Log, a linguistics blog hosted by the University of Pennsylvania.

With the help of linguistics tools such as the software program Praat and spectrograms that provide visual representations of variation in pitch, the researchers argued that the state trooper and Bland were, in essence, speaking different languages.

“What we did is we went through and used this annotation system, and we coded where the phrases are broken up and where the pitch moves up and down, the voice moves up and down, for each of them,” Holliday says.

“What we came to was she is using an identifiably African American tone pattern and he is not really matching her. So she starts in one place. He starts in another place. And it’s clear that as the situation escalates, he’s increasingly interpreting her as disrespectful, hostile, something like that. She does a few things in particular where she uses these kinds of tones, where her voice falls and rises on the same syllable. This is a pattern that we see more frequently with African American speakers.

“With the officer, he doesn’t really do that at first, but as he moves through the interaction with her, he starts to be more like that. So we think there is a mismatch in his expectations of what she was supposed to sound like as a respectful citizen. But this mismatch is fundamentally about the fact that she speaks African American English and he doesn’t.”

Bland died in jail after an incident that appeared to start with no more than a failure to signal. Her family ultimately sued, settling a wrongful death suit for $1.9 million. A misdemeanor perjury charge against the state trooper, Brian Encinia, was dismissed after he surrendered his law enforcement license and agreed not to work in the field again.

Another prominent case examined by linguists is the outcome of the trial in the shooting death of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter in Martin’s death.

In a paper titled “Language and Linguistics on Trial,” Stanford University Professor John Rickford, now retired, and co-author Sharese King, now an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, argued that the testimony of key prosecution witness Rachel Jeantel, a 19-year-old Black teenager, was dismissed as not credible because she spoke in African American English, contributing to the not-guilty verdicts. Jeantel was on the phone with Martin as the incident unfolded.

“They lay out all of these moments where she’s using these features of African American English that could clearly be misinterpreted by people unfamiliar with the variety,” Holliday says. “So basically, she’s speaking really differently than the lawyers, than the jury, than the public.

“There are a number of features of African American English that Jeantel employs that may be unfamiliar to mainstream listeners. For example, Rickford and King point out the use of ‘zero copula’, or the omission of the overt ‘is’ or ‘are’ verb in a sentence. Jeantel also uses differences in use of plural and possessive forms, which are also forms that may distinguish African American English from mainstream varieties.”

Jeantel’s testimony included phrases incorporating those styles, and some listeners may be unable or unwilling to hear beyond a highly socially stigmatized way of speaking.

“So when you hear somebody speak this way and you have these biases, you might just say, ‘Oh, this person is not educated and I’m going to stop listening,’” Holliday says.

“People attach a lot of judgments about morality and character to the way that people talk. And these biases that we have are almost always racist, classist, sexist, problematic in some other way, but it’s not the fault of the language. The language just varies. And that’s a natural part of what language does. But the variation gets interpreted as a problem.

“It’s very transparent that people’s ideas about language aren’t really about language,” she says. “They’re about other sociological phenomena.”

A Journey of Faith and Inquiry

March 4, 2020 by Robyn Norwood Comments Off

Paul Kiefer ’20 outside the Shabazz Restaurant in Durham, N.C., adjacent to the state’s oldest mosque.

PAUL KIEFER’S JOURNEY of faith and inquiry already has taken him great distances. An American Muslim from Seattle who converted as a teenager, Kiefer ’20 studied abroad in Morocco during his junior year to experience the Arabic-speaking Muslim world. Back home in the United States, he looked toward the American South as he prepared to write his senior thesis in history.

There, he was an outsider of a different sort, a white Muslim gathering oral histories and conducting research on the Southern Black Muslim community that emerged in North Carolina in the 1950s and has grown deep roots in the Tar Heel State—a place where the festival of Eid is sometimes celebrated with fried fish and grits.

“They’re doing it right, the whole Southern thing,” says Kiefer, who was partly drawn to the region because of his family’s history there, though his relatives were not Muslim.

The Black Muslim community in North Carolina that was first planted by the Nation of Islam and later gravitated toward the teachings of W. Deen Muhammad is the subject of Kiefer’s thesis, “A Crescent Moon Rises in Dixie: The Foundation and Development of a Southern Black Muslim Community, 1955-1985.”

“Paul is writing about a topic few historians have investigated. So his work is filling a gap in our collective understanding of the Nation of Islam in the South,” says Tomás Summers Sandoval, associate professor of history and Chicana/o-Latina/o studies. “The archival work he’s done so far is already helping to write that history.”

Kiefer’s research weaves source material such as mosque records and contemporary newspaper reports with oral history interviews he conducted in North Carolina during a Summer Undergraduate Research Program project before his senior year.

“We often think of Islam in the U.S. as a present-day story but Paul’s work is a reminder of the importance of both Islam and Muslims to the U.S. past,” Summers Sandoval says. “At the same time, his work helps us better understand the roles various congregations and faiths played in the mid-century quest for Black liberation and autonomy in the South.”

Islam was not truly new to the South when it was imported from Northern cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore in the second half of the 20th century. Kiefer found records of Black mosques in the South as early as 1928 and a Black Muslim farm by 1943, though those groups were members of the Moorish Science Temple of America, not the Nation of Islam.

Even less widely known: Islam’s original roots in the South preceded the Civil War.

“About 15 to 20 percent of enslaved people in what became the United States were Muslims,” Kiefer says. “There are many well-documented examples of Muslims who practiced openly, who ran Friday prayers on plantations, who wrote letters home. At least three actually wound up going back to West Africa thanks to letters they wrote home in Arabic.”

The history of Muslims in the South is a story worth telling, and Kiefer plans to tell many more. He has applied for a Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship and the NPR Kroc Fellowship, both designed to develop journalists as well as storytellers in other mediums. While awaiting fellowship announcements in the spring, Kiefer also plans to apply for public radio jobs, pursuing his determination to uncover little-known stories and histories.

As Free as We Can Be

March 4, 2020 by G. Gabrielle Starr
President of Pomona College Comments Off

IT’S HARD TO THINK of two greater opposites than a school and a prison.

The former is about freeing the mind—the latter, about the loss of all freedom. Of the two, I believe schools are by far the more important.

Pause for a moment to imagine a world where institutions of education did not exist, and every generation had to learn from scratch the basic requirements of life, from gathering food to caring for those who are ill. Our species would not last very long at all, and the individual costs would be high. To quote Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, life would be “nasty, brutish and short.”

Fast forward to the world we Sagehens have inherited, where the wealth of accumulated knowledge, hard-won by humanity as a whole, is waiting for us to share, to rediscover and to build upon. In this view, education is not a luxury. It is a human necessity.

But as proud as we are of the education Pomona provides and the world-within-a-world in which we live, pause for another moment to take stock of where we are more broadly. The United States has the highest number of incarcerated individuals in the world and the largest percent of its population in prison of any country worldwide. Most of those individuals do not have access to educational opportunities, and if they do, the opportunities are largely vocational or max out at high-school level courses. However, a variety of studies have shown that participating in an educational program in prison is the single best way of avoiding a return to prison for individuals who have been released.

Being included in learning, however, doesn’t just mean that those formerly imprisoned might live lives of productive freedom. In my estimation, being included in learning means being given access to one of the key things that makes us human: the possibility of gaining from the past in order to make the future possible.

So Pomona proudly participates in providing a liberal arts education in California prisons, and we will continue to do so. We will continue to share the liberal arts with as many students as we can at the College and across the Los Angeles area. We will continue to produce new knowledge and to test and share what is already known, for the “liberal” of the “liberal arts” originally (taken from the Latin) meant, and still means, freedom—the knowledge needed to enable all of us to be as free as we can be.

In Memoriam

March 4, 2020 by Staff Comments Off

Leonard Pronko

Professor Emeritus of Theatre and Dance
1927–2019

During his remarkable 57-year career as a beloved member of the Pomona faculty, Professor Emeritus of Theatre and Dance Leonard Pronko was known for his infectious love of theatre—and, particularly, for his dedication to kabuki, the traditional Japanese art form combining stylized drama and dance, on which he became one of America’s leading experts.

An embodiment of the liberal arts, Pronko possessed great depth and breadth of knowledge in several fields. He originally came to Pomona as a professor of French and continued in that capacity for almost 30 years. Coupled with his love of French literature, however, was his passion for the performing arts. He started directing theatre productions at Pomona almost as soon as he arrived in Claremont, bringing to the stage works by such playwrights as Shakespeare, Molière and Ibsen. Following his interest in acting and performance and his research interest in French avant-garde theatre and kabuki theatre, over the next half-century he would transition fully into the world of theatre. In 1985, he was officially invited to join Pomona’s Theatre Department, which he did, eventually becoming its chair.

Pronko was probably best known for offering at Pomona one of the nation’s first opportunities for students to learn the authentic basics of kabuki performance and to join in kabuki-style productions. First introduced to the art form during a sabbatical in the early 1960s, he made history in 1970 as the first non-Japanese person ever accepted to study kabuki at the National Theatre of Japan, and in the years after, as he practiced and taught the art at Pomona, he became known as its unofficial ambassador in the United States. With his broad knowledge of international theatre, he helped to turn Pomona into a hub of dramatic experimentation, infusing classic works such as Macbeth with kabuki elements and leading students in his own original productions, such as Revenge at Spider Mountain, which he termed “a kabuki western.” In 1985, the Japanese government awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Class, for his efforts to promote knowledge and appreciation of kabuki in the U.S.

Pronko was the author of several books, including Theatre East and West: Perspectives Toward a Total Theatre, Guide to Japanese Drama, Avant Garde: The Experimental Theatre in France and The World of Jean Anouilh. Among his diverse honors were two Wig Distinguished Professor Awards, a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1972 Los Angeles Drama Critic’s Circle Award for his kabuki productions and the Association for Theatre in Education’s Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education Award in 1997.

Born in the Philippines, Pronko earned his B.A. from Drury College, his master’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis and his Ph.D. in French literature from Tulane University. He also studied at the École Charles Dullin in Paris. He taught at the University of Kansas and Lake Erie College, in Painesville, Ohio, before joining the Pomona faculty in 1957.

Though he retired in 2014, Pronko had remained actively engaged with the College community and the Theatre Department right up until his recent illness.

Jonathan Wright

The William A. Hilton Zoology Professor and Professor of Biology
1962–2019

Professor Jonathan Wright will be remembered for his enormous enthusiasm for both science and music—at both of which he was equally gifted and dedicated—as well as his unsurpassed ability to communicate not only his encyclopedic knowledge in his chosen field of comparative physiology, but also his untiring sense of wonder at the big and little mysteries he had devoted his life to studying.

As one of his recent students noted, his knowledge and enthusiasm inspired his students “to see and explore how science can make the seemingly mundane seem incredible.”

A native of Great Britain, Wright earned his B.A., M.A. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University before coming first to Canada, then to the United States, where he spent five years on the faculty of Northern State University in Aberdeen, S.D., before coming to Pomona in 1998.

At Pomona, he rose to hold the title of the William Atwood Hilton Professor of Zoology. Wright was a two-time winner of the Wig Distinguished Professor Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2001 and 2009.

One student who nominated Wright in 2009 wrote: “Jonathan Wright cares so much about his students. A true mentor, role-model and friend to his pupils, as well as an excellent professor and an incredibly knowledgeable biologist and natural historian.”

Another student wrote in 2001 that Wright “… is one of the nicest guys I’ve met on campus. He is extremely passionate about what he teaches, and that passion rubs off on his students (I can now see the ‘beauty’ in a cockroach). … He is extremely knowledgeable in just about anything. Students have a running joke in trying to stump him with a question he can’t answer.”

Yet another student noted: “Dr. Wright is not only a fantastic teacher; he genuinely cares about all students’ success and strives to help in any way he can. … Walking through Bernard Field Station with him is so much fun because everywhere you go, he has something interesting to say about the surrounding flora and fauna. I enjoyed having him as a professor to the point where I have built my schedule for next semester around taking the other class that he teaches.”

An active scholar, Wright was also a deeply engaged member of the College community, serving in the past as associate dean of the college and as chair of the Biology Department. Recipient of numerous grants for his research from such organizations as the National Science Foundation, Wright also served on numerous committees, including the Faculty Advisory Committee for the Bernard Field Station.

His life as a musician was just as important to him as his love of science. Having studied classical violin from an early age, he performed regularly in orchestral, chamber and solo repertories. In Claremont, he played with the Pomona College Symphony, the faculty string quartet Euphoria, a violin-piano duo and other ad-hoc ensembles.

How to Become Dean of Pomona College

March 4, 2020 by Mark Wood Comments Off

Robert Gaines

Growing up in Alabama, the son of two history scholars, develop an abiding interest in ancient civilizations. Fall in love with things even older at age 5 when your mom brings you a fossil trilobite half a billion years old from a vacation in Utah.

Discover in grade school that you can find fossils of sea creatures 80 million years old right behind your school. Carry that fascination with the geological record through high school to the College of William and Mary.

In college, go on a road trip organized by a faculty mentor to the Grand Canyon and the White Mountains of California, including an unexpected detour to Utah where you encounter the source of your very first trilobite, the House Range.

Go to the University of Cincinnati for your master’s in geology. Take a course with your future Ph.D. advisor, then on sabbatical from UC Riverside, and find her interest in studying ancient ecosystems through their fossils contagious.

Following your mentor to California for doctoral studies, take your fascination with that first trilobite full circle when you decide to focus your Ph.D. thesis on the Cambrian ecosystems recorded in Utah’s House Range.

As a teaching assistant at UC Riverside, find that you love teaching and get your first administrative experience when you’re hired as director of a program to train new science teaching assistants.

Get hired for a one-year position as visiting assistant professor of geology at Pomona and fall in love with the place and its students. Apply for a tenure track position, and to your surprise, get your dream job.

As an expert on the ecosystems and geology of the Cambrian explosion of life forms, travel the world and take part in some of the biggest paleontological discoveries of our time, from Canada to China.

Serve as chair of the Geology Department and take leadership roles in college governance. Among other things, help create the position of chair of the faculty and co-chair the Strategic Planning Steering Committee.

Though you’re shocked to be asked, agree to lead the College’s academic program as interim dean for one year; then, persuaded by the pleasure of working with the faculty, agree to serve for three years.

Pomona’s Kabuki Heritage

March 4, 2020 by Mark Wood Comments Off

In the early 1960s, the late Professor Leonard Pronko discovered the Japanese art of kabuki while studying theatre in Asia on a Guggenheim Fellowship. He then made history in 1970 as the first non-Japanese person ever accepted to study kabuki at the National Theatre of Japan. Bringing his fascination back to Pomona College, he directed more than 40 kabuki-related productions over the years, ranging from classic plays to original creations. The wig pictured here is one of several that remain from those productions. Below are a few facts about that intriguing Pomona artifact. (For more about Professor Pronko’s life, see In Memoriam.)

Fact 1: One of about 20 wigs kept by Pomona’s Department of Theatre and Dance in its restricted costume storage area, this geisha-style wig is part of a collection of props and costumes obtained by Pronko from Japan for his classic kabuki and kabuki-inspired theatre productions.

Fact 2: Like all wigs for female characters, it was intended to be worn by an onnagata, a male kabuki actor who performed in women’s roles.

Fact 3: Other kabuki-related items in theatre storage include swords, wigs, costumes and costume accessories.

Fact 4: Today, the costume storage area holds more than 200 period garments and 300 pieces of jewelry.

Fact 5: Most such wigs are made of either human or horse hair and styled with lacquer.

Fact 6: The origins of the Japanese word “kabuki” are simple and elegant: “Ka” means song; “bu” means dance; and “ki” means skill.

Fact 7: Pronko wrote extensively about the art of kabuki, which he said attracted him because it was so “wildly theatrical.”

Fact 8: Pronko also taught the stylized movement and vocal techniques of kabuki to generations of Pomona College students.

Fact 9: He directed a number of classic kabuki plays, including Narukami Thundergod, Ibaraki and Gohiki Kanjincho.

Fact 10: He also staged kabuki versions of such Western classics as Macbeth.

Fact 11: One of his most original productions was a “kabuki western” titled Revenge at Spider Mountain, based on his love of Native American folklore and inspired by two classic plays: Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees and The Monster Spider.

The Poetry of Grief

March 4, 2020 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

Grief Sequence
By Prageeta Sharma
Wave Books
104 pages
Paperback $20

PROFESSOR PRAGEETA SHARMA’S recently released collection of poems, Grief Sequence, has garnered acclaim from corners with cachet. In this, her fifth book, Sharma chronicles the loss of her husband to cancer and, as The New York Times put it, she “complicates her narrative away from sentimentality and into reality-fracturing emotionality.” PCM’s Sneha Abraham sat down with Sharma to talk about death, life and the poetry she made in the midst of it all. This interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.

PCM: What was the inspiration? It’s loss but can you explain a little bit about it?

Sharma: This one is very different from my other books. My last book had a lot to do with race and thinking through the ideas of belonging and institutions and race and community and who gets to be a part of a community and who is outside of that community by the nature of racial differences and gender. But this one just happened because in 2014 my late husband Dale was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and he died two months after diagnosis.

And so, I was in shock and I had no sense of what had happened and, often they say with shock you lose your memory. So, for several months I couldn’t remember our long marriage. I could only remember those two months of his progressing sickness. When I told my father, who’s a mathematician who specializes in math education, that I was having trouble with sequencing (because it was something I was starting to notice), he said, “Oh well, you’ve always had trouble with sequencing. I tested you when you were five or six.” So it was sort of this joke we had about the concept of sequencing. It led me to research theories of sequential thinking; I started to think about the process of sequencing events and what to do for your recall, and what you do to process trauma, deep feelings and difficulty; I started to write in a prose poem format as much as I could: to place on a page what I could recall. And I was also doing that because I felt truly abandoned by Dale’s illness and death, which were very sudden. He died of a secondary tumor that they discovered after he inexplicably lost consciousness. So, I never had any closure. I didn’t get to say goodbye. We thought we had several months left and didn’t prepare for his death. We had no plans of action.

He was such a complicated person that, to not have had any last conversations just put me into a state of despair. It was an unsettling place, so I had to write myself through it and speak to him and document the days through my poems. And what I didn’t realize was that with such grief comes a fierce sense of loving—believing in the concept of love. Many people say this especially when they lose a spouse—they lost someone they loved, and they didn’t plan on losing them, so they’re still open to the world and to love. They’re still open to feeling feelings. So I started to learn more about my own resilience and my strength, and I was really receptive to the process of becoming my own person. It was painful, but I wanted to document the fact that I knew that when I was at a better place of healing I would feel very differently, and the poems might look different, which they did.

PCM: People talk about the stages of grief. Did you find yourself going through that as you wrote the poems?

Sharma: The joke is that you’re always going through different stages so they’re never linear.

PCM: No, no. They’re not linear.

Sharma: So, I think I went through them all in a jumbled way. I think they hold you in them. Dale was a really complicated person, so I had to really think about who he was, who he is. I learned you love two people at once — you stay in the living world but you still love the person you lost. Grief Sequence has many kinds of love poems. Towards the end of the book are love poems to my current partner Mike, a widower, who helped me through the grieving process.

PCM: You both have that understanding, what that’s like.

Sharma: Yeah. The poems are about grief, love, and they’re about really trying to learn to trust the journey. These poems have taught me so much about my emotions, sequencing and my community.

PCM: Is there a particular poem in “Grief Sequence” that really gets to you or pierces through all of it for you? Is there a pivotal poem in there?

Sharma: I think that there are a variety of poems here. Some poems are processing Dale getting sick. Some are processing experiences with others that are sort of surprising—people can alienate you when they witness you in deep grieving, because some gestures or reactions aren’t pleasant. I began processing what gets in the way of your grief. We can sometimes get hijacked by other people’s treatment, and you forget that you’re really spending this time trying to just protect your feelings. Speaking to widows really helped me. Reading all the books I could find helped; my biggest joke is that the book that helped me the most, which—I mean, it’s sort of embarrassing, but it’s hilarious—is Dr. Joyce Brothers’ Widowed.

PCM: No shame.

Sharma: It was so practical: You have to learn how to shovel the driveway, relearn the basics. It was all of these lists. These basics are the ones that people don’t talk about: the shared labor you have with your partner and what you then have to figure out after their death. For example, my cat brought in mice, and I didn’t realize how often Dale would handle that. Things like that. So, the book was so practical that I just remember reading it cover to cover. I laughed so much when I recognized myself in there.

PCM: Those day-to-day gaps that you don’t realize you’re missing.

Sharma: Make sure to eat breakfast. Try to get enough sleep. So many basics.

PCM: When you’re in grief, I’m sure all those … you need it.

Sharma: All those things, yeah.

PCM: What did you find people’s responses are to the poems? Did you find that people expected you’ve gotten over it now that you’ve written this book?

Sharma: It may be the book; it may be also including a new relationship in the book. I never understood how somebody could move forward, but you really understand it when you have no choice. I think the book helped me document the experiences in real time. Readers have been very generous. I think they didn’t expect the book to be so explicit. One thing that I was also trying to negotiate in the book was poetic forms. Because I’ve taught creative writing for a long time and we teach form, and particularly the elegy, I was reacting to the beauty of the elegiac poem; it can be so crafted that often you’re not feeling like it’s an honest form to hold tragic grief. You can write a beautiful elegy in a certain way, but the tragic losses some of us can experience—or lots of us—may not produce a beautiful poem, and that beauty can be something that almost feels false to access. And so, I started to question the role of how the poem works or what people expect to read as an elegy.

PCM: Talk about some of your early influences in terms of poetry.

Sharma: I think I started writing poetry in high school like lots of people, and so I was really fascinated with what contemporary poetry looked like, reading it from The Norton Anthology of Poetry. And I think about it now and I was often interested in women writers of color, though they were very few. And then I think some women who were writing “poetry of witness” and kind of trying to figure out what their narratives in the poems were about.

PCM: Can you explain “poetry of witness”?

Sharma: According to many poets, it is poetry that feels it is morally and ethically obligated to bear witness to events and injustices like war, genocide, racism and tyranny. Many poets I read during my high school years who wrote about these events bore witness to it in other countries and often about cultures outside of their own. It led me to wonder and examine the distance between their testimony and the culture itself. It also forged the desire in me to read more internationally and in translation rather than through this particular style and method of writing.

PCM: When did it crystallize for you that you wanted to be a poet?

Sharma: I felt like it was a calling back in college but I think it was really applying to graduate school right from undergraduate and getting into a top creative writing program (also getting a fully funded scholarship). I was 21 years old and I just thought, well, this must mean something. And then when I got to grad school, I found a community of poets and that felt right to me. I am so grateful to those people—many are still very close friends today.

Ideas@Pomona: The Summit

March 4, 2020 by Staff Comments Off

THE IDEAS@POMONA SUMMIT, Pomona’s premier lifelong learning event, brought together more than 200 Sagehen alumni, families, students and friends from around the globe for an energetic day-and-a-half conference under the theme Liberal Arts NOW and NEXT. Dedicated to meaningful connection and active dialogue around timely, newsworthy and captivating ideas, the inaugural event took place October 25-26, 2019, at the Hyatt Centric Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.

What does cutting-edge research tell us about who we are and where we are going? How are liberal arts values such as critical thinking and creative learning being brought to bear on today’s unique challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities? The sold-out event featured sessions led by alumni, parents, faculty and friends of the College including featured speaker Ari Shapiro, host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Laszlo Bock ’93, Liz Fosslien ’09, professors Kevin Dettmar, Nicholas Ball, Nicole Holliday and more.

Attendees left invigorated, with an increased enthusiasm for the liberal arts and a strong sense of a visit back to class on campus.

Planning is underway for the next Summit in 2021. Watch for details at Ideas@Pomona Summit

Ari Shapiro gives the keynote address

Ari Shapiro of NPR’s “All Things Considered’ gives the keynote address at the Ideas@Pomona Summit in San Francisco.

Ari Shapiro speaks to a sold-out crowd

Ari Shapiro speaks to a sold-out crowd on Saturday morning.

Fabian Fernandez-Han ’20 and Peter Han P’20 lead an interactive workshop

Fabian Fernandez-Han ’20 and Peter Han P’20 lead an interactive workshop showcasing the creative power Human-Centered Design.

Professor Nicholas Ball

Professor Nicholas Ball on “The Challenges of a Petroleum-Free Society.”

Brian Prestwich P’20

“Creating a Healthcare System that Works for Everyone” panelists (Brian Prestwich P’20) take audience questions.

Alfredo Romero ’91 and Cecil Sagehen

Alumni Association Board member Alfredo Romero ’91 and Cecil Sagehen.

Professor Alexandra Papoutsaki and Laszlo Bock ’93

Professor Alexandra Papoutsaki and Laszlo Bock ’93 discuss “Liberal Arts and the Future of Work.”

Teamwork

March 4, 2020 by Staff Comments Off

National Title for Men’s Cross Country

THE POMONA-PITZER men’s cross country team claimed its first national championship last fall, winning the NCAA Division III title in Louisville, Kentucky.

“This really is surreal. Words can’t really describe the feelings from today,” Coach Jordan Carpenter said after the Sagehens ended the three-year reign of North Central College, a perennial power from Illinois that had won seven of the last 10 titles. “So much elation and excitement for what these guys accomplished today.”

The title is the first NCAA team championship for Pomona-Pitzer since the champion women’s tennis team of 1992.

“We came in with the goal of finishing on the podium, but we hadn’t really talked about the ability to win,” Carpenter said. “We have such a young group and only had three runners with national meet experience, so I honestly thought that next year would be our chance to win. The guys proved me wrong, and we had an amazing day today.”

On the women’s side of the event, Pomona-Pitzer finished in 12th place.

Two Pomona-Pitzer men and two Sagehen women took All-American honors. Ethan Widlansky ’22 came off his NCAA West Region Championship to take a seventh-place national finish in a time of 24:32.9. Not far behind him was Dante Paszkeicz ’22, who also earned All-American honors with a 16th-place finish in 24:48.5. Lila Cardillo ’22 led the way for the women with a 12th-place finish at 21:38.3 and Helen Guo ’20 took 14th at 21:41.0.

The men’s depth helped bring the title home. Just missing the cut for All-American honors was Daniel Rosen ’20, who finished just outside the top 40, in 41st place, with a time of 24:57.9. Ethan Ashby ’21 finished 68th overall with a time of 25:15.0, Owen Keiser PI ’22 finished in 71st place with a time of 25:15.8, and Hugo Ward PI ’21 took 122nd in 25:35.8. Rounding out the performances for the Sagehens was Joe Hesse-Withbroe ’22, who was 164th with a time of 25:51.5.

“The improvement this group has made from last year is remarkable,” Carpenter said.

500 Wins for Coach Kat

WIN NO. 500 ARRIVED in January for Coach Kat—or, more formally, Professor of Physical Education and Men’s Basketball Coach Charles C. Katsiaficas.

It’s little surprise that the week before his milestone victory against Cal Lutheran, Katsiaficas didn’t know when it might come or have any opinion on where it would rank among the most important wins in his 33 seasons as Pomona-Pitzer’s coach.

That’s because the biggest win in his mind is usually the last one. Or the next one. (When this issue went to press Sagehens had won 16 of their last 18 on their way to a 16-4 start.)

“I think it’s hard for any coach to get outside of the current moment—moving on from the last game, preparing for your next game,” Katsiaficas says. “I can say, however, those questions and conversations definitely shine a spotlight on all the remarkable young men that have left their mark on our program through the years.”

The Sagehens have had winning records in 26 of his 32 seasons, with the 27th of 33 well on its way. They have won 11 Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championships and played in the NCAA Division III Tournament 11 times.

Those 500 wins rank Katsiaficas 15th among all active Division III men’s basketball coaches, and he has won more games than any coach in any sport in Pomona-Pitzer history.

Last season’s team was among his best, cracking the top 10 of the national rankings for the first time and setting a program record with 26 wins while advancing to the second round of the NCAA Division III Tournament.

Back in 1986, Katsiaficas was a Pomona-Pitzer assistant coach who got a chance to be interim head coach when the Sagehens’ coach, Gregg Popovich—now the five-time NBA champion coach of the San Antonio Spurs—took a one-year leave of absence.

When Popovich returned, Katsiaficas spent one season as an assistant at the University of San Diego before returning to take over the Pomona-Pitzer program in 1988, when Popovich left to become an assistant with the Spurs.

Women’s Soccer Reaches Final Four

Women’s Soccer Reaches Final Four EVERY SENIOR ON the Pomona-Pitzer women’s soccer team that has reached the Final Four of the NCAA Division III Championship for the first time knows exactly how slender the margin between winning and losing could be

It could be a single goal by first-team All-American Bria VarnBuhler ’20, who set a Pomona-Pitzer record with 21 this season—including nine game-winners, tied for third-most among all Division III players.

It could be a game-saving stop by third-team All-American Isa Berardo PZ ’20, the starting goalkeeper for a strong defense that has shut out 20 of 23 opponents on the way to a 20–1–2 record. After leading Division III in goals-against average and save percentage last season, Berardo is in the top three in both national categories again.

Or it could be as slim a margin as a single penalty kick settling into the back of the net—or tipped away by a finger.

Close games have become a specialty. They advanced to the Final Four with three final scores of 1-0, including a win in penalty kicks after a scoreless tie against No. 3-ranked Washington University, with Berardo making the save that set off a celebration.

It was a reversal of what happened three years ago, when these seniors were playing in their first NCAA postseason and a loss to the University of Chicago in penalty kicks sent them home, one step shy of the Final Four. “I mean, gosh, it was heartbreaking after losing that,” remembers VarnBuhler. “Coming back and having our season potentially end the same way as it did freshman year—that was just not really an option. We had just worked too hard for that to happen.”

It didn’t. The Sagehens got payback against Chicago this time with a 1-0 overtime victory in the regional semifinal on a golden goal by Anna Ponzio PZ ’22. Then they edged Washington in the final, thanks in large measure to what Coach Jen Scanlon calls “this pretty amazing group of seniors.”

A national championship, however, will have to wait for another year, as the team’s incredible season come to a close in the Final Four with a 2-0 semifinal loss against William Smith College.

Player of the Year

BRIA VARNBUHLER ’20, a midfielder on the first Pomona-Pitzer women’s soccer team to reach the Final Four, has been named the United Soccer Coaches Division III National Player of the Year. The first-team All-American scored 21 goals this season, a Pomona-Pitzer record.VarnBuhler is the first Pomona-Pitzer soccer athlete to earn National Player of the Year honors. She also is the first player from the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) to win the award.

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