A Warm Welcome to the New Year
by Alex Harrington ’19
The new year is officially underway! Even with the bittersweet itch of senior year, I am beyond excited to return to work at the English Department. My three years here have seen gleeful hellos and heartbroken goodbyes. I’m honored to offer you our own gleeful hello as we welcome this semester’s newsletter staff. On the editing team this year we have Laura Berglund ’20, and Miriam Moore-Keish ’19, along with myself and Jen Katz ’19 as a dynamic duo of Senior Newsletter Editors. Enjoy these brief introductions to our team:
Laura Berglund ’20 is a junior English Lit major with minors in Spanish and American Studies. She’s from Shoreview, Minnesota, which is 13.7 miles from Old Main! Laura enjoys laughing at most everything, petting bumblebees after they’ve collided with windows, and correcting people when they mispronounce local street names or landmarks. She thinks English majors are the best and that we should celebrate this fact with a huge dance party on Old Main Lawn.
Miriam Moore-Keish ’19 is a senior English Lit major with minors in Psychology and Arabic. She is from Atlanta, Georgia, mostly, but also a lot of other places. Miriam drinks a lot of tea and lets a lot of cats from the street into her house.
Jen Katz ’19 is a senior English Lit major with minors in Religious Studies and Spanish. She grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, but her family is from all over the world (ask her about it!). She went on College Jeopardy! at the age of 20 and made some awkward small talk with Alex Trebek. She is thrilled to be Senior Newsletter Editor this year along with Alex and looks forward to a fantastic year in the English Department.
Alex Harrington ’19 is a senior Creative Writing and Media and Cultural Studies double major. She’s from a small valley town in Western Massachusetts and insists that even though leaves do change colors here, Fall is a whole body experience that cannot be replicated on the plains. She loves romcoms, Emily Dickinson, and zombies.
Another exciting addition to our team this year is Ben LeBlanc ’20, who is spearheading the revamp of our social media presence. If you haven’t already, make sure you follow our official English Department Instagram and Facebook to keep up with our most current updates!
Ben LeBlanc ’20 is a junior Creative Writing major with a minor offense. He is an Artificial Intelligence project led by Neuralink with the purpose of determining stress levels in academic environments. He can juggle four oranges at once, but no more than three mildly-demanding responsibilities. Neuralink hopes to upload a patch to his code by 2020 so that he can stop zoning out and meta-analyzing his presence in Social Environments, but chance of success is Highly Unlikely due to certain classified factors.
The Words will be published on the first Thursday of every month. You can get in touch with us at [email protected], or by visiting the second floor of Old Main. We’re looking forward to keeping you updated on English Department news, developments, and fun!