Kenyon College

Anthony Evan Hecht was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century... history, with the Second World War, in which he fought, and the Holocaust being recurrent themes in his work. Hecht was born in New York City to German-Jewish parents. He was educated at various schools in the city - he was a classmate of Jack Kerouac at Horace Mann School - but showed no great academic ability, something he would later refer to as "conspicuous." However, as a freshman English student at Bard College in New York he discovered the works of Stevens, Auden, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas. It was at this point that he decided he would become a poet. Hecht's parents were not happy at his plans and tried to discourage them, even getting family friend Ted Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, to attempt to dissuade him. In 1944, upon completing his final year at Bard, Hecht was drafted into the 97th Infantry Division and was sent to the battlefields in Europe. He saw a great deal of combat in Germany, France, and Czechoslovakia. However, his most significant experience occurred on April 23, 1945.
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For other people named Peter Taylor, see Peter Taylor. Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor was a U.S. author and writer. He was born in Trenton, Tennessee... to Matthew Hillsman "Red" Taylor, a prominent attorney who played football at Vanderbilt University in 1904 and 1905, and Katherine Baird Taylor. His father's father, Colonel Robert Zachery Taylor, had fought for the Confederate Army as a private under Nathan Bedford Forrest and had almost been killed by night riders near Reelfoot Lake in 1908. His mother's father was Robert Love Taylor, a United States Senator from Tennessee from 1907 until his death in 1912. Taylor spent his early childhood in Nashville. The family moved to St. Louis in 1926 when Taylor's father, lawyer Matthew Hillsman Taylor, became president of the General American Life Insurance Company. In St. Louis, Taylor attended the Rossman School and St. Louis Country Day School. In 1932, the family moved to Memphis, where his father established a law practice. Taylor graduated from Central High School in Memphis in 1935. He wrote his first published piece while there, an interview with actress Katharine Cornell.
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James Mark Borgman is an American cartoonist. He is known for his political cartoons and his nationally syndicated comic strip Zits. Borgman was... born in Cincinnati, Ohio to James and Marian Borgman, where he began his career in journalism as a student at Elder High School. He then attended Ohio's Kenyon College where he started as an English major, then switched to being an art major. He graduated in 1976 with Phi Beta Kappa honors. Borgman met his first wife Lynn Goodwin during his senior year of college at a class called "Jesus and the Gospels". They had two children named Dylan and Chelsea. Lynn died in 1999 from a blood clot following a surgery to ease chronic neck and shoulder pain. In 2003 he married Suzanne Soled, an educational psychologist and professor at Northern Kentucky University. At Kenyon College, Borgman drew editorial cartoons for the Kenyon Collegian. Since 1980, his editorial cartoons have been nationally syndicated, at first by King Features Syndicate. In 2007, Universal Press Syndicate took over the distribution of his editorial cartoons.
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James Arlington Wright was an American poet. Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse... that was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. But by the early 1960s, Wright, increasingly influenced by the Spanish language surrealists, had dropped fixed meters. His transformation achieved its maximum expression with the publication of the seminal The Branch Will Not Break , which positioned Wright as curious counterpoint to the Beats and New York schools, which predominated on the American coasts. This transformation had not come by accident, as Wright had been working for years with his friend Robert Bly, collaborating on the translation of world poets in the influential magazine The Fifties . Such influences fertilized Wright's unique perspective and helped put the Midwest back on the poetic map. Wright had discovered a terse, imagistic, free verse of clarity, and power.
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For other people named Peter Taylor, see Peter Taylor. Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor was a U.S. author and writer. He was born in Trenton, Tennessee... to Matthew Hillsman "Red" Taylor, a prominent attorney who played football at Vanderbilt University in 1904 and 1905, and Katherine Baird Taylor. His father's father, Colonel Robert Zachery Taylor, had fought for the Confederate Army as a private under Nathan Bedford Forrest and had almost been killed by night riders near Reelfoot Lake in 1908. His mother's father was Robert Love Taylor, a United States Senator from Tennessee from 1907 until his death in 1912. Taylor spent his early childhood in Nashville. The family moved to St. Louis in 1926 when Taylor's father, lawyer Matthew Hillsman Taylor, became president of the General American Life Insurance Company. In St. Louis, Taylor attended the Rossman School and St. Louis Country Day School. In 1932, the family moved to Memphis, where his father established a law practice. Taylor graduated from Central High School in Memphis in 1935. He wrote his first published piece while there, an interview with actress Katharine Cornell.
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Joan Lyn Slonczewski is an American microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer who explores biology and space travel. Slonczewski... was born in 1956 at Hyde Park, New York and raised in Katonah, New York. She earned an A.B. in biology, magna cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1977. She completed a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1982 and post-doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania studying calcium flux in leukocyte chemotaxis. Since 1984 she has taught at Kenyon College, taking sabbatical leaves at Princeton University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Slonczewski's research focuses on the pH stress response in Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis using genetic techniques. Slonczewski teaches both biology and science fiction courses. From 1996 through 2008, she has been awarded Howard Hughes Medical Institute funding for undergraduate biological sciences education, which she uses to improve science instruction and to foster summer science fellowships for minority and first-generation students.
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John Crowe Ransom was an American poet, essayist, magazine editor, and professor. Ransom was the third of four children of a Methodist minister. His... family was highly literate. As a child, he read his family's library and engaged his father in passionate discussions. He published five main books of poetry, four books of essays, and edited three anthologies. He also published one textbook on writing, A College Primer of Writing . Ransom was home schooled until age ten, and entered Vanderbilt University at fifteen, graduating first in his class in 1909. He interrupted his studies for two years to teach sixth and seventh grades in Taylorsville, Mississippi and Latin and Greek in Lewisburg, Tennessee. After teaching one more year in Lewisburg, Ransom was selected as a Rhodes Scholar. He attended Oxford University's Christ Church, 1910–13, where he read "Greats", as the course in Greek and Latin classics is called. After one year teaching Latin in the Hotchkiss School, Ransom was appointed to the English department at Vanderbilt University in 1914.
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For other people named Peter Taylor, see Peter Taylor. Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor was a U.S. author and writer. He was born in Trenton, Tennessee... to Matthew Hillsman "Red" Taylor, a prominent attorney who played football at Vanderbilt University in 1904 and 1905, and Katherine Baird Taylor. His father's father, Colonel Robert Zachery Taylor, had fought for the Confederate Army as a private under Nathan Bedford Forrest and had almost been killed by night riders near Reelfoot Lake in 1908. His mother's father was Robert Love Taylor, a United States Senator from Tennessee from 1907 until his death in 1912. Taylor spent his early childhood in Nashville. The family moved to St. Louis in 1926 when Taylor's father, lawyer Matthew Hillsman Taylor, became president of the General American Life Insurance Company. In St. Louis, Taylor attended the Rossman School and St. Louis Country Day School. In 1932, the family moved to Memphis, where his father established a law practice. Taylor graduated from Central High School in Memphis in 1935. He wrote his first published piece while there, an interview with actress Katharine Cornell.
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