Laura Krughoff, associate professor of English and director of gender and queer studies, is a fiction writer and essayist. She won a Pushcart Award for her short story “Halley’s Comet” in 2007 and her debut novel, My Brother’s Name, was a finalist for a 2014 Lambda Literary Foundation Award. A more recent book, Wake in the Night, is a collection of short fiction about women in rural Indiana. We asked her about her work.
Growing up in Portland, Ore., Bella Rodriguez ’24 was struck by the absence of Latino stories in the narrative of the city’s history. It wasn’t until she started studying history, environmental policy and decision making, and Latina/o studies at University of Puget Sound that she started to ask questions about the history of Latinos in her hometown. That curiosity led her to dig deep into the city’s complicated racial history and uncover the story of the Cuban refugee community that sprang up almost overnight in the 1960s.
Czarina Ramsay and her triplet siblings were 5 when their father moved the family to Anchorage, Alaska, for an assignment as a sergeant in the U.S. Army. As Panamanian immigrants with West Indian roots, their language and culture contrasted dramatically with the predominantly white community they settled into.
Brett Kolb’s breakout freshman swim season came with an odd aftermath: He couldn’t keep hydrated.
Kolb ’23 would go to the Diner on campus and drink a 64-ounce cup of water. Then another. And another. He didn’t think much of it, or of the numerous nightly bathroom trips, figuring he was recovering from a hard season. Weeks later, he mentioned it to his roommate’s mother—a nurse—who urged him to get checked for diabetes.
Hollywood legend Rita Moreno charmed the campus community in April when she delivered the Spring 2023 Susan Resneck Pierce Lecture and spoke to a class. Now 91, Moreno is perhaps best known for playing Anita in the 1961 film West Side Story, a role that earned her an Academy Award for best supporting actress— and made her the first Latina to win an Oscar.
Summer around here has a different rhythm than the rest of the academic year. What does it feel like to you?
It’s not quite as busy on campus as it is between September and May, but it’s far from a ghost town. We have students here taking classes and doing summer research, and we have a very vital and busy conference schedule, among other activities. Conferences, summer camps, and our Summer Academic Challenge allow us to make the campus available to the broader community, where people are able to utilize our facilities in a variety of ways.
Faithlina Abeshima ’16 majored in music and psychology, but a work-study in technology set her on a different career path. Shortly after graduating, she was hired by the university as a technology support analyst; then, in 2019, she stepped into the role of information security administrator. We asked her for advice on steering clear of the hackers, scammers, and bots.
I’ve loved teaching the senior-level quantum mechanics course. At this stage of the game, students have enough math skills and physics background to delve deeply into the subject—it’s pretty exciting for them and for me as well. It all starts to come together. I learn more every time I teach the course.
- Greg Elliott, professor of physics, retiring after 30 years at Puget Sound
Sarah Strattan ’11 grew up in Evergreen, Colo., fascinated by the “Fourteeners”—the Colorado peaks that exceed 14,000 feet. In college, Puget Sound Outdoors introduced her to backpacking, and an outdoor leadership experience in Alaska taught her about mountaineering. She climbed Rainier, then Denali. Then she set her sights on the Himalayas. Strattan, who taught middle school science for a time and now works on the ski patrol at Aspen Highlands Ski Area, spends part of each summer challenging herself on Asia’s tallest peaks.
Ronald R. Thomas is home. For 13 years, from the summers of 2003 through 2016, that beloved home was here, as president of University of Puget Sound. His irrepressible enthusiasm for all things Puget Sound so animates the campus today that it’s impossible to speak of it in the past tense. He loved it all: every student, every possibility, every building, every blade of grass. The campus looks the way it does because he was a master of master planning.