Drs. Loren Henderson and Cedric Herring were invited as a select group of approximately 25 leading scholars and activists from around the world to meet at UN Headquarters, NY, January 2016. The conference/workshop met to analyze the relationship between poverty, inequality, and global conflict and to discuss measures that may be taken to ameliorate violent conflict by reducing poverty and inequality. Dr. Henderson presented “Wealth Inequality in Black and White: Cultural and Structural Sources of the Racial Wealth Divide”

A feature published in the December 2015 edition of Seattle Magazine examines how Seattle’s South Asian population is becoming more visible in the philanthropic community. Amy Bhatt, an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies, researches South Asian migration trends in the tech industry and provided perspective on how the philanthropic community has grown over time.

“There’s a lot of wealth that has accumulated here,” Bhatt said in the article. As a result, the first generation of international tech workers in the Pacific Northwest has helped incubate a number of nonprofits and foundations.

Bhatt also observed in the article that more South Asians are emerging as leaders in the nonprofit sector: “You’re seeing more markers of South Asian leaders in general…in American organizations and institutions,” says Bhatt, citing the local examples of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and state Senator Pramila Jayapal. Bhatt said that earlier leaders have paved the way for the new generation. “As a result of a multitiered, multigenerational community, you have much richer examples of South Asian leaders in philanthropy.”

Bhatt recently appeared in a PBS documentary about the 1965 Immigration Act and she’s author of Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest. Read more about her work on the gender and women’s studies website.

Read “South Asians are becoming more visible in the philanthropic community” in Seattle Magazine. 

Piotr Gwiazda, an associate professor of English, has been selected for a prestigious list “Best Books of Poetry in English 2015.” The list was compiled by Adam Zdrodowski, a poet and translator who has published three collections of poetry and translated authors such as Gertrude Stein and William S. Burroughs.

The list included six top poetry books published in 2015 from around the world, including Gwiazda’s Aspects of Strangers which received strong praise from Zdrodowski: “At first, the poems may seem simple, and yet it quickly turns out their simplicity is misleading. Simple phrases keep building up, bringing new pieces of information, sometimes corroborating and sometimes undermining what went before; phrases are sometimes repeated in different contexts, adding to the complex picture of contemporary humans struggling with the paradoxes and pleasures of contemporaneity.”

The book is Gwiazda’s third book of poetry. His areas of interest include modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, poetic theory, creative writing, literary translation and translation theory, intertextuality studies, U.S. literature and culture, and world literature. He has received grants and fellowships from the PEN American Center (The PEN/Heim Translation Fund), National Humanities Center (Summer Institute in Literary Studies), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and UMBC’s Dresher Center for the Humanities. He won the Washington Writers’ Publishing Poetry Contest for Gagarin Street in 2005.

Read more about Gwiazda’s work on the English department website. Read more about the six best books of poetry in 2015.