Alumni News

In her position as Press Secretary for Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock, Meredith Brasher (B.A. 2018) helps manage day to day press operations, works with Georgia’s press corps, and helps to communicate the Senator’s efforts to expand access to health care, protect voting rights and secure long-awaited COVID relief for Georgia.

Isabella McDevitt (B.A. 2020) serves as an Account Manager for TransPerfect in Atlanta, GA.  In this role, she consults both current and prospective clients about language solutions, coordinates project pricing and deadlines, and fosters client relationships.  Her English major roots serve her daily, helping her craft clear, succinct emails and prepare and lead persuasive client presentations.  She maintains her passion for reading by joining her work book club and posting on her book/coffeestagram (@a.well_brewed.literary.life).

Emily Morrow (A.B. 2019) released her first commercially available video game in March 2021, titled REM Cycles. Emily functioned as the game’s writer and narrative designer, developing the game’s plot, characters, and world. She also assisted the game’s programmer, artist, and composer with narrative and aesthetic cohesiveness. The game features over 50,000 written words in the form of dialogue, tutorial text, item and character ability descriptions, and more. Emily also wrote in-character social media posts for the game’s Twitter account and created posts for a development blog on the game’s website, all of which contributed to a cohesive character-based marketing presentation for this independent game. REM Cycles is available to the general public on the digital storefront Steam.

Emily Cofield Rogers (B.A. 1983) has been promoted to Professor of Library Science at Valdosta State University, where she works as reference and government documents librarian at Odum Library. At VSU, she serves on the University Tenure and Promotion Committee, the Undergraduate Research Council, and the Faculty Success Council, and she teaches in the MLIS program. Emily earned the MA in English at the University of Kentucky in 1987 and the MS in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois in 2005. She has applied the skills she developed as an English major to teaching undergraduate English, working in bookstores and scholarly publishing, and writing academic articles in library science as well as greeting card verse. 

In October 2020, Gale Marie Thompson (UGA Alum, 2017) announced the publication of her debut poetry collection, Helen or My Hunger (Yes Yes Books). “Helen or My Hunger is a looping, serial sequence that explores the relationship between memory, language, the body, and power,” writes Thompson. “In dialogue with H.D.’s 1961 epic Helen in Egypt, these poems address the eidolon of Helen of Troy: the ‘echo of an echo.’ They question notions of beauty and the body by communicating with this absence, sustaining this unsustainable dialogue. Ghost? Icon? Mother? Friend? These poems address the ruptures of trauma, violence, with mythology and lineage, with the inevitable failings of gender and the body.” Thompson celebrated her book’s release by creating this thematic Spotify playlist. Kate Gaskin, winner of the 2018 Pamet River Prize, has called Helen or My Hunger “[…] a brilliant lyrical excavation of women as objects, myths, and muses.” Lynn Melnick describes Thompson’s poems as “[…] nimble, inventive, beautiful” and “as pleasurable to read as they are important to digest.” Danielle Pafunda cites Thompson’s Helen as “crafted, redacted, angled,” likening the poems—and women’s bodies—to Trojan horses. Excerpts from Helen or My Hunger have appeared in Bennington Review, Bone Bouquet, Ghost Proposal, Gulf Coast, jubilat, American Poetry Review, and many others. For fans of H.D., Adrienne Rich, Rachel Blau DePlessis, or Virginia Woolf, Helen or My Hunger is not only an intimate engagement with Helen of Troy, but a profoundly philosophical examination of the body as panorama.

Dear Helen, our dead / names on your tongue / each gape a wound / of gold thread, patient / as the teardrop shape / of a hand as it dances / through the other hand / I wait until the hunger returns