It’s back-to-school season, and the Columbia Publishing Course (formerly the Radcliffe Publishing Course) has already launched a new crop of graduates for 2018. Here at Publishing Trends, we’re once again marking the occasion by compiling one mega-profile from the most interesting and surprising parts of the students’ biographies. With the exception of some connecting phrases, all words are the students’ own.
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After moving seven times across three continents, Typical Columbia Publishing Course Grad, a dual US-UK citizen, opened her own private detective agency at the ripe age of seven. Typical Grad spent her childhood hiking, rock hunting, sailing, volunteering at a wolf sanctuary, and reading under the California sun. In elementary school, she wrote and directed a class play and founded a school newspaper. During her senior year, she broke the school record for the 4 x 400 relay and was valedictorian of her high school.
Typical Grad attended Kenyon College in Ohio as a break from California’s sunny weather, where she created a social network for LGBT+/POC publishing creatives and founded an intersectional LGBT+ genre magazine. As a college student, she challenged herself by learning American Sign Language and hiking the Grand Canyon and spent summers in Alaska commercially fishing. Internships with WXAC News and the Emily Post Institute strengthened her skills in writing, web development, and etiquette. She crafted an honors thesis on a reading of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur based on a Foucauldian model of knowledge and power.
Typical Grad spent the next two years teaching in the Czech Republic and Russia, where she learned to love linguistic mishaps and freezing temperatures. She served in Paraguay as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching a small business class and serving as the director of programming for a national youth leadership class, and has also taught teenagers in both a state prison and a Basque ikastola. In her spare time, she attended writing classes and learned zouk, a Brazilian partner dance that taught her life skills both on and off the dance floor.
Typical Grad is pursuing a master’s with a focus on fin de siècle periodicals. Her time editing for a Japanese/English surf art and history magazine has inspired an intentional consideration of aesthetics that extends to every aspect of her workings. She is trilingual and hopes to learn more languages throughout her life; her main goal in entering a career as a book editor is to change attitudes about publishing in translation.
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To find out more about seeing participants’ resumes (or to read the real biographies) please contact Columbia Publishing Course Assistant Director Barbara Clark at bkc2124 at Columbia dot edu.
New York’s other major summer publishing course, New York University’s Summer Publishing Institute (SPI), has similarly talented alumni with rich backgrounds and interests. SPI celebrated its 40th year this summer. To learn more about NYU’s eligible grads or about the program, contact Executive Director Andrea Chambers at (212) 992-3226 or andrea.chambers at nyu dot edu.
