Works

Prolific classmate Richard Seltzer has delivered another important work: Voices of the Owned. It draws on more than 2,000 firsthand accounts of former slaves, collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. Most collections like these chase what was typical. Selzer instead focuses on the individual: distinctive lives, unexpected moments, vivid scenes, and unforgettable turns of phrase.

Richard is making the PDF available free to classmates.  Just download it here. He encourages you to read it and share it with others.

Click through and see the details of how Richard used AI to winnow the 2 million words of the original transcripts into this book, while keeping his own editorial control, as well as a surprising discovery of his own family connection to one of the former slaves!

This book differs from Djelal Kadir’s earlier academic works, originating instead from his recent personal experiences and insights gained while mourning the loss of his wife of 50 years. Drawing on judgment and skills developed over decades of teaching comparative literature, Djelal explored “the stillness at the heart of the chaos, rather than escaping to the swirling edges.” He examined the historical, scientific, and mythical archives, finding examples of profound solitude.

He spent the next five years researching the lives of figures deeply immersed in, and contemplating, solitude, enabling him to assume their voices through 39 letters attributed to each one.  

Fol­low­ing his sci-fi novel Deep Past (2019), au­thor Eu­gene Lin­den has picked up where he left off with Res­ur­rect­ing Bart (2025). The idea for the for­mer book, he told The Hud­son In­de­pen­dent, grew out of a pon­der­ance: “If nat­ural se­lec­tion could pro­duce hu­man scale in­tel­li­gence in just sev­eral hun­dred thou­sand years – the blink of an eye on a ge­o­log­i­cal scale – who’s to say other highly in­tel­li­gent crea­tures haven’t come and gone over the past mil­lions of years.”

Our prolific classmate, Richard Selzer, has done It again – by publishing his newest book, One Family.  This one is very different from his other books, many of which have been profiled in these pages.  This is not a novel; it’s an exploration, a meditation on the nature of human connectedness.

The book starts with a mind-blowing thought experiment (and proof) that, if you have European ancestry, it’s likely that you are related to every other person with European ancestry on Earth today.  We are indeed … ONE FAMILY. 

Richard also makes a generous gift at the end of the article — access to a free copy of the book!

Per his 50th Reunion Essay, Marty Cohen retired in 2015 with six goals, two of which were to publish works in process and create new ones. 

He’s made good on at least one of those goals by publishing Stone Seeds, which Amazon describes thusly: “Stone Seeds is about paying attention to the connections between people and places, poetry and birds, songs and silence, spirituality and the material world.

Marty has been publishing poetry and essays on literature and the arts in periodicals and anthologies since 1970. Stone Seeds brings together the best of his work since A Traveller’s Alphabet (1979).

In this post, Marty makes a generous offer to classmates and shares some personal news, too – read more.

Calhoun roommates in ’68-’69, Scott Howard and Bob Brush have a lot in common:  They sang together in the 1966-68 Baker’s Dozen and were founding members of the Roll and Pin Society (along with Bob Wheeler, James Hallet, Wayne Henderson, Charlie Peck, Brad Davenport and Bo Riehle).

Recently, they decided to collaborate in the creation of a first novel, with Bob as the author and Scott as the illustrator. 

Bob is an Emmy-award winning writer and executive producer of The Wonder Years and recipient of other awards. Scott is a retired banker now deep into painting, non-profit work, and family. “Read More” to see more about the novel, The Piazza: Stories from Piazza Santa Caterina

Ted Snow announced his new book, published just after our reunion, with customary humor: “There are a few benefits of having a stroke, which I did several years ago – like good parking spaces and getting special treatment at the airport – but I don’t recommend it. However, a few good things came out of it: Time to copy and organize of a lifetime’s worth of photos, and writing a book, The Sixth Element: How Carbon Shapes Our World.“

The following Amazon blurb summarizes the contents and offers a preview of the book. Ted’s other personal update is included below that.

As Amazon explains:  “Our math genius, Bernie Weber, is a high school student in Milwaukee who has the ability to deduce the prime factors of any large number. (FYI: modern cryptology is based on using large prime numbers, which computers cannot extract when they are used in encoded messages).

When Bernie performs as “Pryme Knumber” in a math circus at a Milwaukee college, an intelligence officer in the audience realizes the value of his innate ability and informs the CIA of this potential human resource. They test Bernie to see if his ability is authentic and decide to give him a thumb drive with an encoded message to crack. By mistake, they give him a top-secret message they have intercepted but have not been able to decipher….

Dr. Daniel Duke, a professor emeritus at UVa, released a new novel, Pursuit of Happiness, in late June.  It joins two earlier novels — Man Camp (2022) and River of Dreams (2023).  His author profile explains that “his novels address important issues, ranging from what it means to be a man in the 21st century to whether pursuing happiness is worth the effort.” The Amazon “blurb” for The Pursuit of Happiness gives a peek into…