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Take her out to the ball game Alison Peaper '01 has been named the starting shortstop on the 1999 New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference (NEWMAC) softball team. A first-year player from Carmel, Indiana, Peaper helped MHC's team improve to 5-12 in the NEWMAC after failing to win a league game a year ago, and to twelve wins overall following a seven-win season in 1998. In addition to playing outstanding defense, Peaper led the College with a .396 batting average. Included among her team-leading forty hits were eight doubles, a triple, and three home runs. She knocked in nineteen runs and scored twenty-two, earning a .584 slugging percentage--all team highs. Peaper started all thirty-one of Mount Holyoke's games.

Raising a Quiet Storm Lydia Okutoro '98 won a book contract while still a student at MHC. The poetry anthology she conceived, edited, and contributed her own writing to is titled Quiet Storm, and features original poems by young people of the African diaspora. Okutoro will read from the newly released book May 7 at the Odyssey Bookshop.

The idea for the book came to Okutoro as a high school student, when she did a senior project collecting poetry, essays, short stories, and artwork by students and alumni of color. During her first year at MHC, Okutoro compiled her own and other young people's poetry into a larger collection that would represent a broader range of talent and experiences.

Okutoro was born in Nigeria and raised in the United States from the age of nine. In a 1997 interview with CSJ, she said, "I had an important story to tell: about leaving my native homeland and making a new home elsewhere, about ultimately being a stranger to both places, about trying to 'fit in' and eventually carving out a comfortable identity." She wondered if other young people felt the same way and began to see a pattern in the way that her peers expressed themselves. She created Quiet Storm for young poets to share their work with one another and the world.

Inclusiveness workshop held More than thirty people attended "Ableism and Access: Creating an Inclusive Community," an on-campus workshop organized by MHC's ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) Committee, on April 23. The workshop was part of the committee's continuing dialogue surrounding ways to continue to make the College a more accessible and welcoming community for people with disabilities. The workshop addressed "ableism" (the dynamic of able-bodied people viewing the disabled as a subordinate constituency), what it is and how it plays out on a day-to-day level. Also discussed were creative approaches to undoing ableism's foundations and specific ways to create a community that is accessible and inclusive. Disability activist, organizer, and educator Shemaya Laurel and Stephanie Jo Kent, an anti-ableism activist who teaches sociology, communications, and ethics at Community College of Vermont, were the workshop presenters. The committee is planning more programs of this kind for the 1999 - 2000 academic year, according to Associate Dean of the College Rochelle Calhoun.

Tech support team honored The technical support and repair group headed by director Cindy Legare has been selected by the Service News editorial team to receive a 1999 Service 25 Award. Given by the monthly trade magazine for the computer support field, the honor recognizes "individuals, IS support and service organizations, and industry associations that have made a difference in the support and service industry over the last year." Notice of their award will appear in the May issue of Service News.

Grants granted Donald Cotter, assistant professor of chemistry, was awarded $30,000 from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund to support a project titled "Mechanism of Transmetalation of Electrophilic Palladium (II)." He also received a $5,000 stipend from Pfizer to support a student, Margaret Fredericks '00, and her research in his lab this summer.

Darby Dyar, visiting assistant professor of geology, was awarded $49,609 by the National Science Foundation to support her project "RUI: Acquisition of a Mossbauer Spectrometer." (RUI stands for Research at Undergraduate Institutions.) She was also notified by NSF of the award of a $50,000 supplement to her existing NSF-POWRE grant; this supplement will allow her to carry out technique development work at Brookhaven National Laboratories this summer. (POWRE stands for Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education.)

Penny Gill, professor of politics, was selected as a participant in the faculty development seminar at IES Dijon and IES Freiburg in July, 1999. The topic of the seminar this year is EU 2000.

Thomas L. Millette from the Department of Geography and Geology recently returned from a week of work in Taipei, Taiwan, where he was advising Taiwan's Academia Sinica (the National Academy of Sciences) on the uses of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in environmental sustainability analysis. Millette was invited by Dr. Lucia Liu Severinghaus of the Institute of Zoology, Academia Sinica, to help her staff develop GIS approaches to identifying environmental degradation risks as part of a nationwide sustainability study titled "Taiwan 2011." Taiwan is a rapidly developing nation that in fifty years has transformed from a feudal agrarian society to a regional industrial dynamo, with all the associated environmental degradations, according to Millette, who also noted, "Since Taiwan is an island nation just sixty kilometers from mainland China, it has a host of unique problems including severe constraints to growth, food security issues, a measure of political isolation, and a rapidly degrading environment with little natural resource capital to waste."