Graduate Alumni Profiles
2022
Dan Gleason (PhD 2007)
I earned my degree back in 2007, using cognitive approaches to analyze visual imagery in Imagist poetry. Since 2019, I've served as Head of the Upper School at Kingswood Oxford School, an independent 6-12 school in West Hartford, CT. In this role, I've worked to advance the school's vision of innovative place-based and interdisciplinary learning. Before moving to Connecticut, I worked in public education in the Midwest. After Northwestern, I started my career as an English teacher at Illinois Math and Science Academy, a public residential magnet school in Aurora, for students gifted in STEM. I became English Department Chair and, later, Director of Academic Programs, leading curriculum development and promoting faculty scholarship. After IMSA, I moved to a traditional public school, leading the English Department at Maine East High School in Park Ridge, IL before finally moving on to Connecticut. When leading change in all of these different school contexts, I've relied on research, experimental thinking, and the value of multiple perspectives–approaches I learned to value during my time at Northwestern.
(December 2022)
E. Hughes (MFA+MA 2021)
Since graduating from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program, I have become a Cave Canem fellow and am in the early stages of trying to publish my first collection of poems titled Black Women Standing Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water. So far, the collection has been a finalist for the 2022 CAAPP Book Prize and for the Catamaran Poetry Prize. I have also been a featured poet for Rhino Poetry at Printers Row Literary Festival, for Elevate Atlanta (“Color + the Body,” for which I wrote a poem in response to Deanna Sirlin’s paintings) and for Jazz & Culture—among others. I have been a finalist for the 92Y Discovery Contest, the 2022 Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize, and the 2021 Granum Foundation Fellowship Prize. I also have poetry published or forthcoming in the Indiana Review, Hypertext Magazine, Jazz & Culture Journal, Rhino Poetry, and The Art Section. Finally, I have recently begun a PhD in Philosophy at Emory University.
(December 2022)