Above: Aerial view of Porter and Rachel Carson Colleges (photo by Jacinto Salz)
Cowell College
’71 Eugene YAMAGUMA retired.
’74 Annie SCOTT sends this playful message:
’77 Bill CASS recently had his second short story collection, Uncommon & Other Stories, released by Wising Up Press.
’92 Craig HARWOOD worked at the U.S. Geological Survey initially after graduating with a degree in Earth science and later entered the geotechnical profession in 1988, where he practiced as an engineering geologist. He currently holds two professional certifications in the state of California: Professional Geologist and Certified Engineering Geologist. As a hobby he has researched and written about the invention of flight, including an award-winning book entitled Quest for Flight.
Stevenson College
’74 Michael BURKE has been a chiropractor in Oregon for the past 40 years. His forthcoming book, Glad to See Your Back, is a humorous and iconoclastic critique of the chiropractic profession. Excerpts from the book can be found on Michael’s blog, www.MichaelBurkesBackIssues.com. Subscribers will receive updates on the release of Glad to See Your Back. Michael says,”I believe the information I have to share on my blog and in the book is very important to the public. My intent is to highlight what is good and beneficial about chiropractic while raising a flag of caution for the unwary consumer.” Michael’s professional service has included not only the usual neck and back crunching but also independent medical evaluations, fraud investigation, and the development of a managed complementary and alternative healthcare network. Last year he and his wife, Andrea, moved from Portland to the southern Oregon coast. They have three children and a granddaughter.
’78 Leslie KARST’s upcoming food/law memoir Justice is Served: A Tale of Scallops, The Law, & Cooking for RBG, will be released April 4. Karst, a culinary mystery series author, was a small-town lawyer who was good at a job she hated and had taken up cooking as a way to spice up the daily grind. Spice is exactly what she got when her offer to cook for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her husband was accepted. A heartfelt story of simultaneously searching for delicious recipes and purpose in life, Justice is Served is an inspiring reminder that it’s never too late to discover—and follow—your deepest passion.
’96 Bram CAPLAN moved to Guangzhou, China, in the summer of 2022 to take a college counseling position with the BASIS International School network after nearly 20 years in Russia, where he was involved in founding a university launched partnership with MIT.
’05 Jennifer Lynn KELLY’s book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, was published in January. Kelly is an associate professor of feminist studies and critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her book explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism in Palestine/Israel, showing how such tourism functions both as political strategy and emergent industry.
’08 Sampada ARANKE’s book, Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power, was published in February. Aranke is an assistant professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her new book analyzes posters, photographs, journalism, and films that focus on the murders of three Black Panther Party members to examine the importance of representations of death to Black liberation.
Merrill College
’77 Olga NÁJERA-RAMÍREZ received an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.
Crown College
’94 & ’96 Alissa (JACKSON) Nolan completed her master’s of science in academic advising from Kansas State University in May 2022. Having worked at housing for Crown and Merrill Colleges for many years, she is now the graduate student adviser in the UCSC Chemistry & Biochemistry Department.
Kresge College
’74 Katherine ROBERTS spent 30 years at the New York Times, where she was one of the few female editors to lead three news sections (Op-Ed, National, Sunday Review). She left in 2012 to join Bloomberg Opinion.
’86 Robin F. SCHEPPER’s book, Finding My Way: A Memoir of Family, Identity, and Political Ambition, will be released April 18, 2023. Schepper is a former White House staffer and the first executive director of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative. Her book, a deeply personal memoir about finding family and belonging, describes growing up torn between her single Pan Am–stewardess mom and brothel-owning grandmother in 1960s New York City.
Porter College
’10 Amy BOBEDA will release her new book, What Bird Are You?, this spring. Work in this illustrated collection of poetry and essays travels from Sunset Beach across the Valley of Birds, north to Bolinas, and beyond. Along the way, it navigating the worlds of clay, mythology, and birds in an increasingly fragile ecosystem, building new stories from the memories of her parents’ lifelong careers teaching in Cabrillo College’s ceramics department. From the sands of the Left Coast to the parks of New York City, the poems and essays of What Bird Are You? migrate across the landscape and imagination of North American birds.
Rachel Carson College
’95 Jonathan STENGER was appointed as chief strategy officer for YouthBuild USA in July 2022. After working for more than a decade in criminal justice reform and direct service in New York’s jails and prisons, Stenger now leads strategic planning projects that support more than 275 programs around the world that partner with young people to build skills and mindsets that lead to lifelong learning, livelihood, and leadership.
’98 James GETZ writes, “Truly blessed to have attended UCSC when I did—will always remember the time I spent on campus.”
Graduate Studies
’86 Beth MATHEWS’s (M.S., marine biology) book Deep Waters: A Memoir of Loss, Alaska Adventure, and Love Rekindled, will be released in May. One morning while Mathews was a marine biology professor at the University of Alaska Southeast and her son was 9, her fit husband, Jim TAGGART (Ph.D. ’87, zoology) collapsed due to a rare type of stroke triggered by a household chore. This medical crisis threw their family into turmoil, but ultimately revived their relationship and gave her courage to agree to his proposed, ambitious sailing expeditions—before he’d fully recovered—with their son in Alaska’s magnificent yet unforgiving waters. Deep Waters is a candid, uplifting story of relationship growth catalyzed by a medical crisis.
’00 Cori HAYDEN’s (Ph.D. anthropology) book, The Spectacular Generic: Pharmaceuticals and the Simipolitical in Mexico, was published in January. Hayden is a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley and author of When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico. Hayden’s book explores how consumer access to generic drugs has transformed public healthcare and the politics of pharmaceuticals in the global South.
In Memoriam
Rachel CASTILLO (Porter ’19), of Simi Valley, went missing and was found dead in November 2022. She graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in psychology.
Stuart CAMENSON (Kresge ’16) died in a tragic plane crash in Watsonville in August 2022. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz with degrees in chemistry and Earth sciences and went on to work in the campus’s Division of Information Technology as an information systems analyst.