Though Swarthmore is remarkable for its blossom-bedecked grounds, poems sprouting from the fertile soilare a sight seldom seen. But poetry indeed was popping up amongst the flowers last fall, when Amanda Vacharat ’06 and her partner Dorian Geisler staged a stealth operation-cum-poetry invasion of campus.
The couple are co-founders of HOOT, a literary magazine in postcard [...]

It was cold, and her dissertation beckoned, but Khadijah White ’04 was determined as she made her way through the heavily policed throng outside of Philadelphia’s Municipal Services Building to stand alongside her “Occupy” friends on the night of March 15, 2012. Camps of the Philadelphia affiliate of Occupy Wall Street were long gone, but [...]

Poet John Oliver Simon ’64 discovered a happy alternative to his original plan to be an English professor when, seven years after leaving Swarthmore, he joined California Poets in the Schools, a large writers-in-residence program for elementary through high-school students.
Now, more than 40 years after making that shift, Simon has been recognized with a major [...]

“If you’d asked me when I was in grad school if I wanted to do citizen science, I wouldn’t even have known what you were talking about,” declares Alison Young ’00.
The term citizen science, she explains, means public participation in collecting or analyzing scientific research data. She describes it as “a wonderful combination of education [...]

“I’m a huge supporter of liberal arts,” declares environmental lawyer Robert McKinstry Jr. ’75. The first of four siblings to attend Swarthmore, he was equally interested in humanities and sciences. “I didn’t have any trouble getting distribution requirements,” he reports. Uncertain as to whether to go into medicine or law, his course load covered the [...]

When H.G. Chissell ’96 looks at a large building, he sees a “virtual power plant” that could be making money for its owner by selling electricity it doesn’t use.
Chissell helps large electricity customers shift their use away from peak times, when the cost of producing the power is at its highest. The utilities that would [...]

Elizabeth Economy ’84’s interest in China and the environment was first sparked at the University of Michigan, when she was working on her doctoral dissertation on Chinese and Soviet strategies toward global climate change. After finishing a year of fieldwork in China and the Soviet Union, she says, “I became interested not only in the [...]

Although many sustainability experts express a doomsday view of Planet Earth’s future, David Burack ’62 is an optimist.
“It doesn’t mean the issues have gone away,” he explains, but addressing environmental concerns has become “second nature” around the world. Dealing with complex sustainability issues has led to the creation of a toolkit that includes legislation, analytical [...]

Columbia’s Main Street corridor should be the hub of the city: It runs directly north from the South Carolina state capital grounds and abuts the city’s business district. Yet for several decades it has languished, a victim of suburban flight and related economic trends afflicting many American downtowns.
But now a serious effort to revitalize Main [...]

One was a math major at Swarthmore, the other was an English major. One of them is detail-oriented, the other likes to look at the big picture first. One teaches at an urban university in the middle of Detroit, the other at a tree-filled campus in suburban Tacoma, Wash.
But what Elizabeth Sherr Sklar ’63 and [...]