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Meet some of the notable UWâMadison graduates of spring 2021
The pandemic couldnât hold them back â theyâve won major national academic honors, appeared on network TV shows, helped classmates avoid COVID-19, improved the campus, and even won a Grammy.
Hereâs a look at just a few of the students who will be graduating from UWâMadison May 8. Consider them a small subset of the excellence of the Class of 2021.
Her campus legacy? The first South Asian a cappella singing group
Mahima Bhattar
As a freshman
, Mahima Bhattar noticed there was no a cappella singing team among the South Asian performing arts student organizations. She soon rectified that, founding Wisconsin Waale (
Al Young, a Berkeley resident and the 2005 California poet laureate. Credit: Michael Young
Al Young, a nationally renowned novelist, essayist, screenwriter, professor and poet whom Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed as the state poet laureate in 2005, died April 17, two years after suffering a major stroke. He was 81.
Young, a long-time Berkeley resident whose deep, melodic voice was as smooth as the blues music he adored, saw his work become a permanent feature in the city’s landscape. His poem,
Who I Am In Twilight, is embedded in the Addison Street Poetry Walk, right in front of Freight & Salvage. Berkeley also proclaimed Feb. 5, 2013, as Al Young Day.
It may seem odd that Maggie Shipstead ’05, whose third novel,
Great Circle, arrives this spring, didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer. The current Los Angeles resident born in Orange County, but peripatetic for a few years in-between remembers reading as having a more prominent role in her life than writing. Her mother, she says, sometimes suggested otherwise, “Like, ‘Well, maybe…you’ll be a writer one day,’ and I was really resistant to that idea.”
Harvard was a clearer path: her father attended the College, and her mother the Graduate School of Education. Shipstead says she entered as an “aggressive” high-school graduate, but the environment caused some culture shock. She started two days after 9/11, and still recalls the palpable sorrow hanging over fellow students, many of them East Coasters. With time, she learned to temper her competitiveness and immerse herself in the academic experience. “My freshman year I got a B, and I’d never gotten even an A-
HOUSTON Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Academy Award-winning screenwriter, Larry McMurty, age 84, died of heart failure the night of March 25, 2021, in his North Texas hometown of Archer City, 25 miles south of Wichita Falls.
In the fall of 1954, then-18-year-old McMurtry, right off the family ranch, arrived in Houston to begin his first semester at Rice Institute (later to be renamed Rice University). As an undergraduate, McMurtry shared a garage apartment on North Boulevard near Rice Village with roommates Douglas Milburn, who would become a German language professor at Rice, and future Houston engineer, John Haydel.
In his memoir,
A Literary Life (2009), McMurtry fondly recalls how at Rice he was introduced to American-born, British “Modernist” poet, T.S. Eliot, and his “stream of consciousness” writing style used in his 1915 poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” This was a technique that would also be adopted by Beat-era writer Jack Kerouac, songwriter