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�鶹��Ѱ��alumna fights to educate girls in the world’s youngest country

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:36:07 +0000

�鶹��Ѱ��alumna fights to educate girls in the world’s youngest country Rachel Sauer Wed, 07/08/2026 - 09:36

Cody DeBos

In South Sudan, change happens when girls pick up books, says Micklina Kenyi

Before a girl opens her eyes in South Sudan or in a refugee camp across the border, her day is likely already spoken for.

There is water to fetch, meals to cook and siblings to care for. In families stretched thin by poverty and regional instability, she may be sent to work in a neighbor’s household, her wages handed directly to her parents until it’s time to marry.

School, if an option at all, belongs to her brothers.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumna Micklina Kenyi fled the now-South Sudan as a child and built the nonprofit Girls With Books! to support girls there in attaining education.

This is simply the way of life in South Sudan, a fledgling country celebrating 15 years of independence July 9.

Micklina Kenyi grew up in this world and knows it well. Now the �鶹��Ѱ�� alumna is working to change the outlook on education in South Sudan one girl at a time.

From refugee to advocate

Kenyi fled what is now South Sudan as a young child, spending years crossing borders and running between villages, orphanages and refugee camps before arriving in the United States in 2003 as part of the Lost Girls of Sudan program.

She eventually made her way to Colorado and �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, where she earned dual bachelor’s degrees in political science and women and gender studies.

“I felt these majors would help me understand the politics going on the in U.S. and in South Sudan. I wanted to understand the question: ‘Why are people using women and ignoring women?’” Kenyi says.

She also wanted to research why harmful cultural practices are consistently forced on women and whether women in South Sudan were alone in facing them. Unsurprisingly, they aren’t.

After learning of similar experiences lived out by women across India, China, Eastern Europe, Africa and indigenous communities in America, a conviction took shape.

“It is only going to be women who can liberate themselves, and only women to be advocates for themselves and come up with programs that will elevate the situation of all women. Why? Because we understand what it’s like and what it takes to change things,” Kenyi says.

With this perspective, Kenyi leaned on her education to start building what would eventually become the Boulder-based nonprofit Girls With Books!, where she serves as executive director.

Building Girls With Books!

The organization’s roots trace back along the very pathways through which Kenyi found herself arriving in the United States.

“It was once possible to bring girls to the U.S. the same way that I came, through legal process, so I thought maybe I could do something like that,” she says.

Unfortunately, that pathway closed as the political landscape in Sudan and South Sudan shifted. But rather than giving up, Kenyi and Girls With Books! has developed an approach that brings education to the girls in their own hometowns.

“The mission of Girls With Books! is to educate South Sudanese girls to become peacebuilders and positive change-makers in South Sudan,” says Micklina Kenyi. (Photo: Micklina Kenyi)

“We provide education for South Sudanese girls in Juba and Bor cities, as well as in northern Ugandan refugee camps. Our program covers primary and secondary education, including post-graduation courses like computer skills and entrepreneurship,” Kenyi says.

The program funds tuition and room and board at private schools to address the limitations of government-run public schools. It also provides girls with uniforms, school supplies, toiletries and feminine hygiene products.

“The mission of Girls With Books! is to educate South Sudanese girls to become peacebuilders and positive change-makers in South Sudan,” Kenyi says.

That’s an uphill battle in a country where fewer than 5% of girls graduate high school. However, Kenyi says most girls jump at the chance to go to school when an opportunity becomes available and thrive once there.

For a girl whose day was once consumed by labor and household chores, graduating from school opens new doors. Some go on to university, others start businesses, and even those who marry soon after graduating carry their education forward.

“They carry with them the knowledge and skills learned in school and become moms who are better equipped to raise children who usually have better health and education outcomes than most,” Kenyi says.

For those who want to pursue a future outside the home, jobs are scarce, Kenyi says, which is why Girls With Books! seeks to equip graduates with practical skills in addition to a good education.

“The program includes post-graduate work in computer training and job-readiness skills like interviewing, networking and resume writing. Armed with some of these practical skills, graduates have a greater potential to be hired,” she explains.

In 2025, Girls With Books! supported 116 South Sudanese schoolgirls, a number expected to grow to 150 this year. (Photo: Micklina Kenyi)

Fifteen years and building

This July marks 15 years since South Sudan declared independence. Building a new country from the ground up is arduous work, and there is still much to be done.

“South Sudan has not yet realized its potential as a new independent country,” Kenyi says.

She calls out the endemic corruption that has diverted oil revenue—the country’s main source of income—away from roads, hospitals, schools and civil servants a young nation desperately needs.

Meanwhile, ongoing fighting disrupts students’ routines and complicates operations on the ground for organizations like Kenyi’s.

“Some of the biggest challenges to the work of Girls With Books! are the lack of focus, by the government, on building the country’s infrastructure and investing in the educational system and in civil society,” Kenyi notes.

Yet the girls keep showing up.

“There is, however, surprising resilience among the young students we work with, and their sense of hope often reminds us how important our presence is for their futures,” she adds.

Pitching in

Over time, Kenyi and Girls With Books! have identified a formula that works. In 2025, the organization supported 116 South Sudanese girls, and Kenyi expects to raise that number to 150 this year.

The next challenge is scaling their impact even further.

“Our hope is that we can find enough funding to implement these programs on a national basis, so that young women can begin to impact the directions of the country and to cement the commitment to a peaceful society,” Kenyi says.

Of course, finances aren’t everything. For those interested in contributing beyond a donation, Kenyi says Girls With Books! welcomes volunteers to help with communications, program design and fundraising efforts.

“Also reaching out to students in U.S. schools so students here can better understand the realities of life in countries like South Sudan,” she adds.

Much like its future as a country, the story of South Sudan’s next generation is still being written. Thanks to the work of Kenyi and Girls With Books!, girls in Juba, Bor and the surrounding areas are in class, ensuring they have a fair chance to be the ones who write it.

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In South Sudan, change happens when girls pick up books, says Micklina Kenyi.

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Top image: Girls at school in South Sudan (Photo: Micklina Kenyi)

Recent grad finds purpose among the gibbons

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:20:50 +0000

Recent grad finds purpose among the gibbons Rachel Sauer Wed, 06/24/2026 - 15:20

Cody DeBos

Asian studies alumnus Lucas Lowenfish, soon to become a Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar, experienced ‘a big trajectory change’ during Primates of Vietnam study abroad program

Before the sun rises in Cát Tiên National Park in Vietnam, the forest is wide awake. Lucas Lowenfish recalls slipping into the humid darkness with a few friends from his study abroad group to hike toward a tree they’d been told about.

This particular tree hosts a family of gibbons that congregates every morning to sing just as light begins to filter through the canopy.

“They start jumping and dancing around and doing their songs. It’s a coordinated singing that sounds unlike anything I’ve heard before,” says Lowenfish, a recent �鶹��Ѱ�� graduate in Asian studies.

Recent Asian studies graduate Lucas Lowenfish pivoted his career path after participating in the Primates of Vietnam study abroad program.

Later that morning, Lowenfish and a friend wandered deeper into the forest. Upon rounding a bend in the trail, they found themselves just feet from two gibbons mid-call. Close enough that, as Lowenfish puts it, “You can feel it in your head.”

That morning in the forest, and others exploring Cát Tiên and the jungles of Vietnam, gave Lowenfish a new direction for his career.

An unlikely primatologist

Lowenfish grew up in Washington, D.C., asking his parents for more time at the primate exhibit every time his family visited the zoo. He arrived at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder as an Asian studies major after taking Chinese classes in high school.

A career in primatology had never crossed his mind.

Then came a study abroad program led by �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder anthropology professors Jonathan O’Brien and Herbert “Bert” Covert. The duo takes students through an immersive tour of the biodiversity of Vietnam, visiting national parks, conservation NGOs, research centers and wildlife rehabilitation facilities.

For Lowenfish, the trip was an eye-opener.

“I’d never really thought about how studying monkeys could be a job, you know? But then my professors are in the field and we’re meeting people who are doing this full-time. Now that I was seeing that this is a thing, I knew I totally wanted to do it, too,” he says.

He calls the trip a “big trajectory change” for his career goals.

The “Primates of Vietnam” program runs each summer and draws a small cohort of eight to 15 undergraduates for a three-week adventure. Lowenfish says the experience rewards a certain kind of student.

“You definitely have to be adventurous and willing to step pretty far out of your comfort zone. But if you can do that, it’s like the greatest trip ever.”

What’s killing the gibbons?

After completing the study abroad trip, Lowenfish returned to Boulder and began writing a senior thesis on gibbon conservation across Southeast Asia.

Gibbons, natives of not just Vietnam but also Myanmar, India and Bangladesh, are among the most endangered primates on Earth. The threats driving their decline are consistent across borders.

Lowenfish says the main contributors are habitat loss from logging, industrial agriculture and expanding construction projects in the old-growth forests gibbons need to survive. Poaching is also a factor, with gibbon hunting feeding both the traditional medicine trade and the illegal pet market.

Lowenfish’s thesis draws on a study in which researchers examined dozens of established and potential gibbon habitats across several southeast Asian countries.

“The finding is pretty straightforward. These areas need immediate protected status, and that kind of systemic mapping needs to happen across all southeast Asia,” Lowenfish says.

But the tension between conservation and rapid economic development makes that work harder. Lowenfish watched this play out firsthand in Da Nang, where a critically endangered primate called the red-shanked douc lives on a coastal peninsula.

“These development companies, mostly doing hotels and resorts, because they’re right on the beach in Da Nang, have been able to lobby to get more and more of the land. They’ve been able to get it unprotected and develop on it,” Lowenfish says.

“They’re just building more hotels and there’s already like 50 hotels there. Half of them don’t even make money, but they just keep building them, and it’s ruining the habitat.”

Lucas Lowenfish and other participants in the Primates of Vietnam study abroad program walk through the forest (left); sunset on the Dong Nai River in Vietnam. (Photos: Lucas Lowenfish)

A cooperative solution

Lowenfish is careful not to let the scale of the problem crowd out the solutions. His thesis makes the case that meaningful conservation is happening.

Formal protected areas are the most effective intervention for gibbon populations. In Indonesia, a Wildlife Crimes Unit assembled a large ranger force in one national park and produced measurable population gains. Lowenfish says this model has since expanded to other countries in the region.

But the interventions he finds most compelling are the ones that work with local communities rather than ignoring their economic realities. He describes a project he learned about in Vietnam, in which an outside organizer partnered with slash-and-burn farming communities to offer a better solution.

“They taught these guys how to grow their own coffee more sustainably, package it and sell it,” Lowenfish says.

The same logic supports an eco-hostel project on an island critical to sea turtle nesting.

“The operators hired local rangers to patrol the shoreline and act as guides for the tourists. And these are the same guys who were hunting the turtles before,” says Lowenfish.

By creating new sources of income for local communities, these initiatives and others like them offer an alternative to clearing forest habitats for development or hunting endangered animals to sell to black-market buyers.

“You can’t just go in and tell someone to stop doing something and just expect them to do that for the good of the gibbons, especially when it’s their livelihood. You have to find ways to work together so everyone can benefit,” Lowenfish says.

Next stop, Madagascar

This fall, Lowenfish heads to Madagascar as a Peace Corps volunteer. While most of his time will be spent teaching English, Madagascar is home to lemurs, a primate lineage found nowhere else on Earth—and one that struggles with the same conservation challenges Lowenfish has been writing about.

He’s already picturing how to spend his free time.

“I’m hoping I can volunteer with a research center or something like that. Hopefully I can get into some real primatology stuff there, but even just getting to hang out with some lemurs would be pretty cool.”

It’s a fitting next chapter, but gibbons are still his focus right now. When asked to make the case for gibbon conservation, Lowenfish had an immediate answer.

“They are some of the most unique and beautiful creatures on Earth. They’re the only species with that particular combination of song and choreography.”

But there’s a practical argument, too.

“Gibbons are the premier seed dispersers in Asian forests. They eat fruit and distribute the seeds across huge territories,” Lowenfish says.

“Once we lose them, the entire forest suffers.”

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Asian studies alumnus Lucas Lowenfish, soon to become a Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar, experienced ‘a big trajectory change’ during Primates of Vietnam study abroad program.

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder graduate student wins DOE award, joins NASA-DARES

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:53:07 +0000

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder graduate student wins DOE award, joins NASA-DARES Rachel Sauer Tue, 06/16/2026 - 09:53

Kayleigh Wood

Earth science PhD candidate Catherine Fontana will pursue cyanobacterial biofilm research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Catherine Fontana, a geobiology PhD candidate in the �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of Earth Science and the Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology Program, was recently selected for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) award for her research on cyanobacterial biofilms.

The highly competitive program offers PhD candidates in various STEM fields the opportunity to advance their thesis research at one of DOE’s research facilities alongside a DOE national laboratory scientist. Additionally, awardees are eligible to receive a stipend for general living expenses and inbound and outbound transportation.

“The DOE SCGSR program allows me to study microbial processes using cutting-edge analytical techniques and world-class facilities that are a hallmark of the Department of Energy national laboratories,” Fontana says.

PhD candidate Catherine Fontana was recently selected for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Research (SCGSR) award for her research on cyanobacterial biofilms.

In the Department of Earth Science, Fontana is co-advised by stable isotope geochemist Boswell Wing and microbial physiologist Sebastian Kopf. Her research on cyanobacterial biofilms seeks to understand the connections between microbial physiology, mineral precipitation and stromatolite (a layered, rock-like formation built by microbial communities) formation using stable isotope geochemistry and experimental evolution.

From October 2026 to April 2027, Fontana’s SCGSR award will support her study at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where she will work closely with Rhona Stuart, who leads the DOE’s MicroBiospheres Scientific Focus Area. The DOE laboratory offers Fontana the opportunity to leverage a stable isotope technique called NanoSIMS to track variation in stable isotope composition at the micron-scale level.

The project, “Tracking Carbon Flow in Cyanobacteria Biofilms and Their Mineral Byproduct,” explores “how carbon moves through cyanobacterial biofilms and the extent to which this carbon contributes to minerals they make, like carbonate, that eventually turns them into rocks, like stromatolites,” she explains, adding that her work is especially meaningful in the context of developing next-generation biotechnologies in which cyanobacteria and their biofilms may be an innovative foundation for bioeconomy products.

Charting the future of NASA astrobiology

Additionally, after a highly competitive open-call application, Fontana was selected as one of nine early-career scientists to serve on the 49-member NASA-DARES Task Force 2. Composed of members of the astrobiology community, NASA-DARES, or NASA’s Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy, will serve as a roadmap for the organization’s future astrobiology research, which aims to understand life’s origins, evolution and distribution across the universe.

Since January, NASA-DARES Task Force 2 has been building on the nine major focus areas—which include comparative planetology to understand habitability and astrobiology in society, among others—identified by Task Force 1 by gathering community input through virtual webinars and public discussions. Task Force 2 is currently synthesizing community perspectives into a document outlining contemporary astrobiological interests, available opportunities and the diverse scientific approaches and disciplines in motion across NASA Science.

As the executive secretary of Focus Area 8, Early Career and Workforce Development, Fontana has worked with her team to solicit and synthesize community input regarding how NASA can best support early-career astrobiologists and develop the field over the next decade.

“As an early career researcher passionate about the future of astrobiology, I am profoundly honored to be part of NASA-DARES,” says Fontana. “As the only early-career member of the ‘Early Career and Workforce Development’ focus area, I feel a strong responsibility to represent early-career voices and perspectives. This role provides me with a unique opportunity to help shape the chapter’s findings and contribute to pivotal conversations about the future of astrobiology.”

NASA-DARES is still soliciting feedback: The public comment period for NASA-DARES is open this month and close July 2. The final NASA-DARES document will be shared at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in December.

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Earth science PhD candidate Catherine Fontana will pursue cyanobacterial biofilm research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

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How does it feel to be alive? Art has answers

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:29:25 +0000

How does it feel to be alive? Art has answers Rachel Sauer Mon, 06/15/2026 - 16:29

Clint Talbott

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Megan O'Grady's book fuses memoir and art criticism in ‘unusual and risky’ work that’s drawing fans and kudos

When it comes to art, your heart is as important as your brain. This is what Megan O’Grady feels.

She should know. O’Grady, assistant professor in art and art history at the �鶹��Ѱ��, is the author of How it Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, published this year.

A former art critic at The New York Times, O’Grady calls the book “unusual and risky,” but the gamble seems to have paid off. The New Yorker chose it as one of the best books of 2026 thus far, and it has received a starred Kirkus review. Art and literary publications, from Hyperallergic to The Yale Review, have covered it, and a wide range of readers have found her approach to art “resonant in their own lives.”

Megan O'Grady, assistant professor of art and art history at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, is the author of How it Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, published this year. (Photo: Thorsten Trimpop)

The book focuses on five works of art, which frame, reflect or distill chapters in her own life. She quotes the artist Barbara Kruger, who defined art as “the ability, through visual, verbal, gestural and musical means, to objectify one’s experience of the world: to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.”

O’Grady concurs, saying: “I have often been bludgeoned by art’s beauty, energized or pulverized by its emotional content, vacuum-sealed within its force-field. I’ve looked at it and thought, This is exactly what it feels like to remember someone I lost, or, This is what love is, a tenderness toward existence.”

Additionally, she contends, art “provokes unanswerable questions about how to live in a fragmenting society. It enacts transfers of energy, joy and defiance. It suggests new forms of connection and belonging.”

O’Grady is a critic and essayist and has also written for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and Vogue.

Recently, she answered questions from Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine. Her responses follows:

Question: How can a regular person have greater appreciation for art? Are there steps one could take?

O’Grady: In my view, your appreciation of art is no more or less refined as mine or anyone else’s. My book directly challenges the idea that one must be an expert to enjoy art, and I’m skeptical of approaches to art that feel precious or exclusionary. Part of being human is to look for meaning in life—and art is one mode of seeking.

How It Feels to Be Alive models a mode of looking at art as an intimate encounter, one that deploys—in my experience, anyway—not instantaneously, but over time, in different seasons of life: as teenager trying to figure out who I was, or in moments of loss—after the end of a long relationship, or after losing my home and everything I owned in a freak accident.

Art helped me think through becoming a parent, and the awareness that I had deeply implicated myself in our broken world. It changed the way I think about the natural world and the invisible histories written into the landscape. It made me look very clearly at people with very different experiences of American life than my own, and it challenged me to deal with some of my own unresolved feelings about all sorts of things: creating a home, the unconscious shame I had about my body, about materialism and guilt.

I’ve always been interested in art’s capacity to make us feel things, to challenge the way we see ourselves understand the world around us. This, to me, is why we need art—in any form, be it visual art, music, literature—and why we come to it seeking answers or solace or self-recognition or things we can't put into words.

Nan Goldin, Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston, 1973, cibachrome print. (Courtesy of Nan Goldin and Gagosian)

We live in an era that both fears and devalues art, that often treats it as a commodity, an artifact to categorize by medium and period, or to instrumentalize in displays of political dominance. I’m especially concerned by characterizations of art as elitist, decorative or superfluous, and we can already see the result of our educational systems’ deprioritizing of the arts and humanities in declining creative and critical-thinking skills.

We look at art with the same eyes we do everything else. What are you attracted to and why? Is there more to be learned from other works by a particular artist, or about the artists and the times they were responding to? Art is entirely subjective: It hits us all differently depending on where we’re at in life, our experiences and interests.

I encourage readers to seek out the art in their midst—this is what I try to do, anyway. Build it into your life; get on mailing lists. For those interested in visual art who live in the Boulder area, the MFA show at �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum is a great place to see emerging artists addressing the issues of our time. There are exceptional art institutions as well as alternative art spaces across the country.

Question: Your book has elements of a memoir and elements of art criticism. In taking this approach, you share portions of your life that range from joy and pain and points in between. Can you talk about how such open introspection might help the reader understand art better—or feel it more fully?

O’Grady: Art is private in origin and public in expression—this is essential to its power. As an art critic for The New York Times, I found myself listening to artists’ stories, many of them intensely personal, and reflecting on everything that had led up to the creation of these charged objects we see in museums and galleries. The artists had risked a lot to make the work they did, and their trust in me was humbling. I began to think of the other side of the equation—what impact art had had in my own life, and what I was risking in my work as a critic.

Things were heating up in the world—a global pandemic, a turn toward fascist politics, race and gender-based violence—and I began thinking more about why we should care about things like art in times that often feel chaotic and cruel. Because I did care, even though so many things about our culture leads us to cultivate cynicism and self-interest. Being honest about these things is a risk; truth-telling is a risk. Because art both exposes and asserts cultural values, it can really upset people.

Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963, gold leaf and gesso on canvas, 6 ft. 3 in. × 6 ft. 3 in. (190.5 × 190.5 cm). Gift of Celeste and Armand P. Bartos. (© Agnes Martin Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY)

These are the tensions that inspired me to write the book and that guided its structure. Honestly, we should all be taking risks right now.

Question: If a student asked you to list five works of art that conveyed how it feels to be alive, how would you answer?

O’Grady: We all have to find the answer to this for themselves. How It Feels to Be Alive tackles recurring themes in my life and in the lives of some of the artists I’ve known.

In the chapter on Agnes Martin, I’m thinking about connection and isolation, and the impact our friends have on us. A chapter that begins with Carrie Mae Weems’ “Kitchen Table Series” leads me consider the complexity of seeing oneself clearly when we’re so busy being seen. Kruger’s “Untitled (Your Body),” which kicks off chapter 3, was one of the first works of art that led me to understand what it meant to have a critical perspective on the world, and later, as a parent to a daughter, to confront my own internalized misogyny.

The great performance artist Pope.L, with whom I traveled to Flint, Michigan, to do a project involving the tainted water—we bottled and sold it as a Pope.L-branded art object to raise money for the people of Flint—challenged my uneasy feelings about home as troubling national or personal identity, the subject of chapter 4. The last chapter is about environmental artists and how they reframe our position on Earth, anchored by the largely overlooked land artist and monumental sculptor Beverly Pepper.

These are the major themes, but within each chapter, they become more complex, involving other artists and works. And they are certainly not the only themes in life—the book doesn’t try to be comprehensive. That would be impossible. Rather, it seeks to model a way of looking at art, encouraging others to seek out their own works of art in any form that are meaningful to them.

Question: You mentioned that you love your students, who are “less interested in making a mark than in leaving no trace,” a great line. Your writing (and good writing generally) is also a form of art. Do your students appreciate that, particularly in the TikTok era? Do you have a sense of this?

O’Grady: They all see reading and writing as essential to their creative process. My graduate students, MFA candidates in arts practices who are learning where they fit into larger conversations about representation and politics, use writing to refine the conceptual elements of their visual practice—that is, to better grasp and articulate a strong point of view, which involves a great deal of reflection and critique. We’re all asking ourselves what’s important in this moment in time in which our attention is fragmented and monetized and so much of what used to connect us feels broken.

Most of the artists I teach and write about in the book—Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, Arthur Jafa, Trevor Paglen, Robert Adams, Imani Jaqueline Brown and Carrie Mae Weems, just to name a few—use text or narrative extensively in their art and/or have a writing practice complementary to their visual work.

Question: Beverly Pepper’s art, which forms the basis of a chapter in your book, was criticized with sexist tropes, but it reflects (or punctuates) the monumental scale of the landscape and the cosmos. Perhaps this question is outside the realm of how it feels to be alive, but your recounting of this episode spurs a question about how it feels to be a female artist in a male-dominated world. Or, more generally, how it feels to create art that is the “deeply rooted understory.”

O’Grady: Part of what thrills me about being a critic is looking at a single work of art over time and thinking about how it can reveal tremendous cultural shifts, and personal ones.

Art is private in origin and public in expression—this is essential to its power.

Pepper’s story, for me, is very much about how it felt to be alive as a discredited or overlooked artist—one who was making work that was by any measure groundbreaking and radical. It is dehumanizing not to be recognized for one’s work because of the body one is born into.

In the last chapter, I play with the idea of the anomaly—in art history, but also in the cosmos. Humans always center themselves, but what if, as Pepper and other artists have done, we centered the land instead, reframing our perspective? What if we are the anomalies? This is what art and art criticism does best: reframe and challenge our assumptions.

Pepper’s anomalousness is but one example of the many people left out of art’s dominant narratives. Art history is a set of stories that are continually being rewritten, in part because so many people were left out of previous drafts, or because considerations of their work were so essentializing. In the book, I argue that it is impossible to make art or behold it separately from the conditions of its making and beholding.

Question: In the chapter “Forces of Nature,” you ruminate on the landscape of Colorado, suggesting that remarking on its humbling effect is “cliché.” Can an observation or feeling that might be called a cliché be expressed in a way that is not cliché?

O’Grady: I certainly hope so! Art/literature/music show us this time and again—that the things others have experienced before us have the capacity to compel us anew via the human imagination. Life, at the end of the day, is a cliché. Behind human is a cliché. It has all been felt before—this is part of what makes art capable of transcending time and place—and yet there will always be more to think, to see, to say.

Question: You offer an extended meditation on Agnes Martin’s Friendship, particularly by the suggestion to approach her work “as you would cross an empty beach to look at an ocean.” That seems to suggest that we should have an emotional and intellectual receptivity?

O’Grady: Those are Martin’s words, not mine. She articulated this as an ideal—an ambition for her work. She was reaching the peak of her powers just as conceptual art, with its theories and manifestos, was beginning to dominate the conversation. Martin, who found solace in Christian and Buddhist thinkers, wanted something less intellectual from her work: to induce a particular feeling of infinitude, humility, wonderment and vastness in spectators.

In my book, I return a few times to Martin’s image of crossing the beach to look over the ocean. In her life, Martin had the experience more than once of coming metaphorically to the edge of the shore, or precipice, in her life—as, perhaps, we all have, in our own ways, when we’re at loose ends. It is both exhilarating and terrifying to look into the great beyond, and she confronted this to a degree that perhaps no artist has before or since.

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Megan O'Grady's book fuses memoir and art criticism in ‘unusual and risky’ work that’s drawing fans and kudos.

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Claes Oldenburg, American, born in Sweden (1929–2022); Coosje van Bruggen, American, born in the Netherlands (1942–2009). Shuttlecocks, 1994, aluminum, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, paint, 230 9/16 × 191 7/8 in. (585.6 × 487.4 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. (© Estate of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Image courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Digital Production & Preservation)

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Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Shuttlecocks, 1994, aluminum, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, paint. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.

Undergraduate Isabella Perrin named 2026 Cech Fellow

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:12:39 +0000

Undergraduate Isabella Perrin named 2026 Cech Fellow Rachel Sauer Wed, 06/03/2026 - 17:12

The newly established fellowship, named in honor of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Thomas Cech, gives students opportunities for research, professional mentorship and career exploration

Isabella Perrin, a �鶹��Ѱ�� undergraduate student studying molecular, cellular and developmental biology and public health, has been selected as one of 176 inaugural Cech Fellows by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

The fellowship, awarded to an inaugural cohort of undergraduates from 109 institutions in 36 states and territories, is named in honor of Nobel laureate Thomas Cech, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder distinguished professor of biochemistry, former HHMI president and current HHMI investigator.

The Cech Fellows will spend nine weeks this summer conducting hands-on research with HHMI scientists at universities and research institutions across the country, as well as at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus in Virginia. They will contribute to research while receiving professional mentorship and exploring potential careers in biological and biomedical research.

"I’ve always believed that getting students into real research environments early is one of the most powerful things we can do for them and for science,” said Cech. “I’m deeply honored that this program carries my name, and I look forward to seeing what this first cohort of Fellows will go on to achieve.”

Leslie Vosshall, HHMI vice president and chief scientific officer, noted that a single summer in the right lab can kickstart a scientific career: “By asking real questions alongside scientists at the top of their fields, this year’s Cech Fellows will have the opportunity to see what a life in science actually looks like.”

Perrin, who is working with researchers at the University of California Berkeley this summer on immunology research about the pathways and mechanisms that relate to autoimmune and inflammatory disorders, has previously conducted RNA research with Robin Dowell, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, and Mary Ann Allen, a research associate professor with the BioFrontiers Institute.

“As a Cech Fellow, I’m honored and excited to join a diverse community with engaging and curiosity-filled science research,” Perrin said. “I value this opportunity not only to learn from mentors and peers about how to conduct meaningful research but also to engage in research that, at its core, is based in bettering individuals’ quality of life.

“I hope to learn and use new skills to contribute to the field in a rigorous manner, and to use a creative mindset to approach challenging questions. I love learning about the capabilities and quirks of the immune system and am thrilled to be a part of a lab that focuses on applying this work to human health conditions.”

Summer research experiences are “often where undergraduates discover their passion for scientific inquiry,” said Joshua Hall, HHMI lead senior director and scientific program officer at HHMI. “The Cech Fellows Program gives talented students direct access to some of the most exciting science happening anywhere in the country, and we’re thrilled to welcome this inaugural cohort.”

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The newly established fellowship, named in honor of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Thomas Cech, gives students opportunities for research, professional mentorship and career exploration.

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Live from the Octagon with Michel Jarjour

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:48:54 +0000

Live from the Octagon with Michel Jarjour Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/26/2026 - 12:48

Kayleigh Wood

Undergraduate student balances passion for high-risk combat sports with neuroscience studies, aiming to make mixed martial arts safer for all fighters

Michel Jarjour knows what it’s like to love something that could hurt him. Even after years of avid mixed martial arts (MMA) fandom, the third-year undergraduate student at the �鶹��Ѱ�� still finds the UFC scary. “You look at these fights, and they’re getting kicked and punched to the head. It’s terrifying.”

Though an active participant himself in both Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Muay Thai at the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Rec Center, Jarjour insists that a career in professional fighting is off the table. “You’re putting your body through hell and back. You’re taking so much damage,” says Jarjour. “I’m not willing to give my life to that… My brain is a little important [to me].”

A junior on the pre-health track, Jarjour is pursuing a degree in neuroscience with minors in Spanish, sports media and biochemistry. He balances his studies and involvement in the Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program with his passion for high-risk combat sports, which he shares with listeners in a live monthly radio show on Radio 1190, Join the Octagon. “There is something so beautiful, something so adrenaline-based about the live commentary that I absolutely love,” he says.

Michel Jarjour is a rising senior on the pre-health track, pursuing a degree in neuroscience with minors in Spanish, sports media and biochemistry. (Photo: Michel Jarjour)

Beyond the octagon

Since Fall 2024, Jarjour’s radio show has covered main card, pay-per-view UFC events that occur roughly once a month. In January, the UFC removed traditional pay-per-view events and ended its partnership with ESPN, relocating its live broadcasts to the streaming service Paramount+. Jarjour shares that these changes have led to scheduling disruptions that have put Join the Octagon on a temporary pause. “It’s unfortunate,” he says, “and it’s also made me recognize that I want to do more with the Join the Octagon brand.”

Jarjour credits the leadership skills he has gained as director of �鶹��Ѱ��GOLD with helping him guide Join the Octagon in new, expanded directions. �鶹��Ѱ��GOLD, which stands for “Gaining Opportunities through Leadership Development,” is a free leadership development program that is open to all �鶹��Ѱ��students. Beyond events and conferences, the program provides both introductory and advanced leadership courses.

After leading a group of over fifteen people at �鶹��Ѱ��GOLD, Jarjour says he is confident that he can effectively manage a team and delegate tasks. With a recently assembled team of like-minded volunteers tackling everything from marketing to betting analysis to social media, an official Join the Octagon website is now under construction, and plans for a research-backed podcast are in the works.

With the new, extended platform, Jarjour strives explore UFC events through the lens of his others passions: “I would love to combine my love for neuroscience with my love for UFC and MMA, and the best way I’m going to that is either by have a conversation [and] putting it into the show, the podcast, the radio show, social media, whatever, and [then], by becoming a sports neurologist.”

'I want to become a sports neurologist'

The UFC, which was founded in 1993, is still a relatively new organization. For MMA fighters, medical practitioners and combat sports enthusiasts alike, growing fears parallel the growing awareness of the long-term effects of brain damage.

Jarjour, who has been tuned into the UFC for years, addresses the difficulty of watching a former MMA fighter’s health deteriorate in real time: “You can just tell [something is wrong by] the way they’re talking and acting, and it’s scary… UFC fans are seeing [the] news and are generally worried.”

As a sports neurologist, Jarjour says he hopes to help UFC fighters recover from persistent symptoms associated with traumatic brain injuries. While some medical doctors for the UFC serve ringside, making calls on whether a fighter is stable enough to compete and continue a fight, Jarjour stresses that his pursuits transcend octagon-side intervention.

“It’s not just a split-[second] decision that I want to make. It’s an ‘I want to be able to be in your life and help you out and make sure that you’re living a long and healthy life’ [kind of thing].”

Michel Jarjour rappels down the side of a skyscraper. (Photo: Michel Jarjour)

In addition to his interest in sports neurology, Jarjour is minoring in Spanish, with the hope of connecting with more of his patients on a deeper level: “I would love to be a Spanish-speaking doctor who can help not only English-speaking patients, but also immigrants from Hispanic countries and Latino countries, to be able to make them feel more comfortable throughout the entire medical process.”

While Jarjour says his interest in the medical field in general began in middle school, the choice to pursue higher education was solidified in the summer after his senior year of high school. In the middle of the night, he recounts waking up to a knock at the door and the sight of his distressed neighbor. “[I’d] never interacted with her in my life,” he says, “but she’s clearly in a state of panic, and she’s like, help. Please, help. My husband is on the ground, I have no idea what to do… so I go over to the house, call 911, make sure that he’s comforted, okay and breathing and all that.”

Around twelve hours after the paramedics arrived to take Jarjour’s neighbor to the hospital for treatment, Jarjour and his mom went to check in. He recounts that moment in the hospital: “I sit down with him and talk with him for a while, and I hear about his life story and the experience and all that. And then a few weeks later, I go to his house, and I find out that he's been consistently going to the hospital ever since that moment, and [he] told me that he trusted me more than the doctors that he's been going and talking to. And I told him, well, you still need to trust your doctors. I'm not a doctor. Don't listen to me entirely. Go listen to the medical professionals.

“But at the same time, there was something about that. He basically said that I'm taking the time to listen to him and connect with him and understand what he's going through, and the fact that he said that– [it] was the last, final pillar that I needed to reassure myself, especially before going into university, a big, pivotal moment of my life, it was the last pillar that reassured me that medicine was for me.”

A surge of adrenaline

In high school, Jarjour spent two years on the Arapaho Rescue Patrol, a team of volunteer high-school students that responds to emergency calls in the Front Range. While Jarjour says the patrol teaches very basic medical knowledge, on that night when his neighbor was in need, it was more than helpful.

“I found myself realizing consistently that the medical component of the patrol was one of, if not my favorite, part of the patrol,” says Jarjour. “I love the rescuing; I love the searching. I love the hiking and camping and all that. But the medical component was always what drew me in.”

Beyond helping others through medical intervention, he admits that he loves the adrenaline rush. “I think I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie… Any time that [search and rescue] alarm goes off, you are just pumped with adrenaline, and it’s something I’ve always appreciated.”

Michel Jarjour (front, black cap) with colleagues recording a program for Radio 1190. (Photo: Michel Jarjour)

That ability to respond to pressure at a moment’s notice has been essential for his duties as an RA. In his experience, Jarjour has found that “a lot of people don’t like the ‘responding to incidents’ component of the position because it’s stressful, it’s tiring. You know, it could be the middle of the night, and you don’t want to be doing that.” Yet Jarjour says he appreciates the call to action: “I love [getting] the phone call… there’s something going on, please respond. I do appreciate that adrenaline rush. And, obviously, I want to make sure everyone’s safe. I’m not wishing for anyone’s downfall… I do like helping people out. It’s a very fundamental value of mine, just helping people out. And so, that’s what I’ve loved about the RA position–I’ve been able to do that.

“I’ve responded to poop on the floor, I’ve responded to residents vomiting, I’ve responded to people dead in the mountains. Especially since I want to be a doctor, I’m probably going to see the worst of the worst issues.”

'My love, my life, my hobby'

A key to navigating his very full calendar and the high-intensity situations to which he is drawn has been an awareness of and care for his mental health. “One thing that I tell people when they ask me (how I do it) is, find your Thing.” For Jarjour, the one activity that makes it all work for him is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. “I’ve been doing it for 11 years of my life, and it is [the Thing]. It’s never going to end. I tell myself all the time,” says Jarjour, “Jiu-Jitsu is the one thing that I will do until the day I die. It’s my love, it’s my life, it’s my hobby.”

A hobby with risks…

At the age of 11, during a practice with the adult class, Jarjour learned how risky. “Someone rolled me, placed my hand on the mat, just [acting on] instincts, and crack, crack, crack.”

The aftermath was four broken fingers on his right hand, which he recalls were “floppy” and extremely painful. Yet, after about four months of healing, Jarjour was back in the gym with his parents’ full support: “I’ve just been a very athletic and energetic kid my entire life… [my parents] never really told me, like, hey, you’re not going back. They loved the community; they loved the gym.”

With support from his parents, Jarjour continued to immerse himself in Jiu-Jitsu: “The beauty of Jiu-Jitsu,” says Jarjour, “is that you think you learn it, you know a technique, and you know all there is behind one position and then boom, there’s about 700 million other techniques just for that one position alone. And then you find out there’s hundreds of positions that you can be in.” He likens the sport to a game of chess: “You have to be able to move your piece, know what each move could do, and at the same time, predict what your opponent’s going to do.”

These mental gymnastics happen every moment throughout a fight. Yet, within the confines of the controlled, regulated gym space, Jarjour finds the high-intensity sport relieving: “I’ve gone back through my middle school and high school years, [and] all that stress would have really put a toll on my mental health, as well as the fact that I’ve gone through traumatic events, tough moments with the patrols, for example, all of these super high-stress, impacting events. And the reason why I am able to sit in front of you right now, and [say], I’m more than okay and I’m happy in life is because I found my Thing.”

He adds that it may be the sport, it may be the community, it may be a blend between the two, “but I know for a fact that I will never leave that sport because of how much it’s impacted my life. I’ve walked into the gym, and I felt terrible. I’ve walked in saying I don’t want to go. I’ve walked in with tears in my eyes. I’ve walked in having experienced–I’ll get real with you for a second–a school shooting, and I’ve come out every time from those experiences feeling so much better.”

How does he do it?

In his own words, Michel Jarjour’s “system is systeming.” From hosting a radio show to directing �鶹��Ѱ��GOLD to peer mentoring for both the Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program (MASP) and the math department, not to mention responding to incidents around the clock as an RA and much, much more, it is fair to wonder if Jarjour sleeps at all. Here are just a few of the things that work for him:

Giving yourself grace

Jarjour stresses that comparison is unproductive: “Don’t compare yourself to me, and the reason I say that is because we all have different limitations. We all have our limits. We all have our aspirations, goals, values, etc., and that is a huge determinant on what you should be doing and how much you should be doing.”

Google Calendar

“People look at my Google Calendar and have a heart attack,” says Jarjour, and, yes, his Google Calendar is an explosion of overlapping color at seemingly all available hours of every single day, but it’s a system, it’s reliable and it works for him.

“It’s even like, if I literally just need to shoot [someone] an email, I will put it in my Google Calendar. [If] I need to call someone, put it in my Google Calendar… I have every single thing that I can possibly need to know in that Google Calendar, so that way, I’m always on top of it.”

ANDing

“ANDing is something that �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder actually taught me,” says Jarjour. “The whole concept of ANDing is that you literally take two things, or a couple of things that you’re passionate about, and you bridge the gap between those two. So, for me, that’s neuroscience slash medicine and sports, and that’s why I ANDed them together.”

Jarjour says that many people are already ANDing subconsciously, but finds “when you make it a known thing, you can actually go and seek it a little bit more. . . . Now I know that I can go do these things on a more consistent basis, and it’s allowed me to combine so many of my fields of study, my interests [and] my hobbies.”

Finding your “Thing,” finding a community

For Jarjour, training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is the key to managing his busy lifestyle. He urges others to find the “Thing” that makes it all worth it, one that is tailored to each individual’s personal interests. With so many ways to get involved, Jarjour says it would be impossible for him to champion a single program above the rest. Regardless, whether it’s all things media, music and entertainment at Radio 1190, or what he describes as “the most amazing, tight-knit community I’ve ever been a part of in �鶹��Ѱ��GOLD,” Jarjour remains adamant that mental health flourishes when individuals actively engage with their own communities, pursue personal interests and, as he puts it, find their Thing.

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Undergraduate student balances passion for high-risk combat sports with neuroscience studies, aiming to make mixed martial arts safer for all fighters.

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Top photo: Michel Jarjour leads a �鶹��Ѱ��GOLD activity. (Photo: Michel Jarjour)

Grad ponders the past and considers the future

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:54:29 +0000

Grad ponders the past and considers the future Rachel Sauer Thu, 04/30/2026 - 16:54

Abigail Verneuille working at an archaeological field site in northern New Mexico. (Photo: Abigail Verneuille)

Rachel Sauer

Abigail Verneuille, who is earning a BA in anthropology along with a GIS certificate, is honored as the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate

In the summer of 2024, following her sophomore year as a �鶹��Ѱ�� anthropology major, Abigail Verneuille signed up for archaeological field school in the Velarde Valley of northern New Mexico.

The area is stunning with its boundless sky and mosaic of mesas, but summers there are intense—arid and scorchingly hot, plus dusty and buggy.

“We were sleeping on the floor for a month, and despite that and the heat, all the dirt, the bugs, everything, I just had the best time of my life,” she says. “I loved everything about it.”

Abigail Verneuille (third from left), the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate, with (left to right) Dean of Arts and Humanities John-Michael Rivera, Dean of Social Sciences Sarah Jackson, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Daryl Maeda, Dean of Natural Sciences Irene Blair and Interim Associate Dean for Student Success Jennifer Fitzgerald.

Before that summer, she had indistinct ideas about her path following college, but after it she knew that she wanted a career in archaeology and directed the rest of her undergraduate education toward that goal—earning a certificate in geographic information systems (GIS) and computational science and writing a thesis aiming to predict past streamflow heights of the Rio Grande River to identify years of agricultural instability.

In recognition of her innovative research, academic excellence and dedicated work, Verneuille has been named the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate.

“Verneuille’s perfect academic record tells only part of the story, as she has taken courses ranging from humanities to women and gender studies to biological anthropology to math to astronomy to geographic information systems to computational science, and she has received straight A’s in all of them!” wrote Scott Ortman, professor of anthropology, in recommending her. “She has also conducted archaeological field research in North Macedonia and participated in the anthropology department’s archaeology field school in northern New Mexico. Her honors thesis project emerged from that experience.

“What stands out about Abby’s thesis is not just its organization, clarity and technical sophistication, but the fact that the work is of such significance in its field.”

Hiking into the backcountry

Because the kind of archaeology she wants to do is outdoors and sometimes miles down a dirt road, it helps that Verneuille has always loved to be outside. Growing up in Tennessee, she spent a lot of time hiking and exploring—activities she continued when she moved to Boulder for college.

She majored in anthropology and minored in women and gender studies, which allowed her to study themes of religion and ritual that dovetailed with her archaeological research. She discovered her academic passion, though, near the tiny community of Estaca, New Mexico, where she and her research colleagues opened four two-meter-by-one-meter rectangles in which they found artifacts that helped describe the people who lived in that area before and after Spanish colonialism.

Another project on which she worked was documenting petroglyphs with the Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Project. “There would be days where we’d hike an hour and a half into the backcountry and spend eight hours recording petroglyphs, then hike an hour and a half back up this mesa, and that was just the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” Verneuille says.

In talking with archaeologists from other universities, though, she realized at field school that she would need technical expertise to accompany her hands-in-the-dirt skills, so in Fall 2024 she began pursuing her GIS and computational science certificate. “For that, you’re required to take a semester of statistics in R Studio and then two semesters of coding in Python, and I’d never really thought of myself as a computer kind of person, but I got thrown straight into it,” she says.

“But once I got into the actual mapping classes, the spatial analytics, all the remote sensing, that’s when I thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing, I love this.’”

Abigail Verneuille working at an archaeological field site in northern New Mexico. (Photo: Abigail Verneuille)

Amazing work, amazing people

For her thesis, Verneuille sought to tackle a 100-year-old mystery in U.S. Southwest archaeology: When Pueblo ancestors migrated from the Four Corners region into the Rio Grande Valley in the 13th century, why did they initially settle away from the main courses of the Rio Grande and Rio Chama, where most of the water was, only to gravitate toward the rivers about 100 years later?

Verneuille combined river flow data from the Embudo gauge, the oldest river gauge in the United States, with weather-station data and tree-ring data reflecting precipitation and temperature from the headwaters of the Rio Grande to essentially “predict the past” and understand June flood risk from the present back to 1200 A.D.

Abigail Verneuille conducts land surveys in northern New Mexico for her archaeological research. (Photo: Abigail Verneuille)

Transitions visible in her model corresponded with the end of a phenomenon called the Medieval Climate Anomaly, an unusually warm and wet period worldwide.

“In a final stroke of brilliance, Verneuille not only showed that this reduction in June flood risk corresponds in time to the concentration of population along the main river channels, but she also considers how Pueblo ancestors would have interpreted this change in the environment by considering depictions of water serpent beings in rock art of the area,” Ortman wrote. “Her work shows that climate change can improve local environments for humans in counterintuitive ways, and that there is a connection between the practical and the spiritual with regard to human adaptation to the environment.”

She notes that while the physical work of archaeology was fascinating, she equally loved the community-building aspect of it, working with people who live in the area and whose ancestors were the Tewa-speaking people she was studying. In March, she and several colleagues gave a presentation to residents in the area on what their research had revealed about things like diet and socioeconomic differences of the people who lived in that area hundreds of years ago.

“They were gracious enough to welcome us into their home, so everyone sat around the dining room table and we had a little projector,” Verneuille says. “This is their livelihood, their community, so they had a lot of questions, and it was such a rewarding experience to see how the technical side of academic work has real-life impacts.”

It’s work that she hopes to continue doing after she graduates Saturday, and she has applied for a field technician position with cultural resource management firms. She also is aiming for graduate school in the next five years to continue her archaeology studies.

“It’s amazing work and the most amazing community of people,” she says, “and one that I’d love to continue being a part of.”

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Abigail Verneuille, who is earning a BA in anthropology along with a GIS certificate, is honored as the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate.

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A new (and not extinct) moth emerges from the Florida Scrub

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:20:20 +0000

A new (and not extinct) moth emerges from the Florida Scrub Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/24/2026 - 08:20

Rachel Sauer

After publishing about a moth he’d only seen in collections, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Ryan St Laurent travels to Florida and spots the elusive—and previously thought extinct—Cicinnus albarenicolus

On the second of two nights he spent deep in central Florida forests last week—dripping sweat, shrouded in swarms of flying ants and June beetles, well into the 20 kilometers he’d eventually walk monitoring his four traps—Ryan St Laurent saw the thing he’d come, but didn’t really expect, to see.

To anyone who hadn’t spent a dozen years studying it, the sandy brown wisp might have looked like a fragment of autumn leaf or a shred of bark, but St Laurent immediately recognized Cicinnus albarenicolus. He’d just never seen the moth alive before, let alone in the wild.

In fact, until November, St Laurent thought this new species of Mimallonidae, or sack-bearer moth, might be extinct (DNA barcoding of moth specimens in collections had identified it as a new species). Before November, it hadn’t been seen in its extremely limited Florida habitat since the 1960s.

Ryan St Laurent, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and �鶹��Ѱ��Museum curator of entomology, traveled to Florida last week to try finding the elusive Cicinnus albarenicolus moth.

When news came that a collector had found one of the presumed-extinct moths in a sliver of white sand scrub in the Florida peninsula, St Laurent, a �鶹��Ѱ�� assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and �鶹��Ѱ��Museum curator of entomology, had just finished writing a recently published paper describing the new C. albarenicolus, comparing it with other Mimallonidae species.

“I had written that it might be extinct, so I had to revise the paper and bring in some additional co-authors,” St Laurent says. Then he learned about an upcoming scheduled burn in one of the very few areas where C. albarenicolus conceivably could be found, so he booked a flight to Florida.

“I don’t think this is the only population in existence, and I don’t think it’s going to get burned up and go extinct,” St Laurent said several days before flying to Florida. “But I want to go out there and at least try to get a couple of tissue samples in the event we can’t find it again.”

Needles and haystacks don’t adequately encompass his aim; he was trying to find a small brown moth in a 450,000-acre forest.

‘These look really cool’

But how does a scientist first steer his scholarship to a little-known and barely studied family of moths, a member of which may or may not have been extinct? For St Laurent, the path began during undergrad at Cornell, where he studied entomology and worked with museum insect collections. The collections manager encouraged him to find something that nobody else was working on, “but there was a lot of competition in butterflies and moths—it’s a popular group as far as insects go,” he explains.

“I remember going through the collection, asking, ‘What am I going to work on?’ when I came across this particular family (of moth). I was like, ‘Well, these look really cool,’ but when I went to try to curate them, I realized there were no resources, no books, no field guides, nothing.”

Perfect, he thought. If nobody was working on that family, he would. He wrote his undergraduate honors thesis then pursued his PhD in charting the phylogeny, or tree of life, of this small group of moths. “Once you have a tree of life, you can start talking about them and you can contextualize them as a member of bigger butterfly and moth groups,” he says.

It wasn’t until St Laurent got to the Smithsonian for his postdoc that he had a chance to order mitochondrial sequencing on one of the Mimallonidae specimens that he’d identified as different from its family members. That sequencing showed it was genetically different from anything else in its family, so when St Laurent came to �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, he continued the project of sequencing specimens from various collections.

The female Cicinnus albarenicolus moth (left) that flew out of the darkness of Seminole State Forest in Florida last week, and Ryan St Laurent (right) holding the twig on which it perched.

Most of the specimens were many decades old, compounding the challenges of genetic sequencing. St Laurent worked with a Canadian lab that specializes in barcode sequencing—a technique that focuses on short sequences of genes—sending them prepared samples for testing. In one instance, St Laurent sampled the leg of one of the few recent specimens, which he put on a sequencing plate and sent to Canada in January, looking for further evidence that this was, in fact, a new species of moth.

The genes didn’t lie: It was.

A moth flies out of the darkness

As if discovering a new species isn’t a big enough deal, discovering that it’s not extinct after all is enough to drive any researcher from the lab and straight into the Florida thickets.

Among the things that make Mimallonidae interesting, St Laurent says, is they belong to a superfamily with ancient lineage—more than 100 million years old—99% of which live in Central and South America. Only a handful of species in the family occur in North America, but the ones that do are (mostly) quite common.

Ryan St Laurent set up four insect traps with moth-attractant LED lights.

Except, of course, for C. albarenicolus—endemic to small patches of Florida Scrub, made rarer still by habitat loss. “Only 10% of Florida Scrub is left,” St Laurent said before leaving for Florida, “and the scrub that does still exist is super isolated. We don’t know if those little pockets can support this moth at all.”

Through some scientific sleuthing and mapping the locations where collection specimens had been found, St Laurent narrowed possible C. albarenicolus habitat to six sites in the Florida peninsula: eastern Ocala National Forest, Weeki Wachee north of Tampa, Cassia and Cassadaga northeast of Orlando, the Archbold Biological Station on the Lake Wales Ridge in Central Florida and coastal southeast Florida in Port Sewall. Each location has or had the rare Florida Scrub habitat—specifically white sand, open canopy scrub, which C. albarenicolus seemed to favor.

“This particular family of moths, there’s a reason nobody studies them,” St Laurent said before leaving for Florida. “They’re really hard to find and really hard to raise in captivity. I’ve done field work all over the Americas, and I’m lucky if I see one or two a night in Central or South America. I’m very used to not being able to find these things, which is why I do a lot of work in collections.”

Still, he had to try. He flew to Orlando and then drove to the township of Cassia. He had previously seen a specimen in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City that had been found near Cassia in 1964. “I knew about that specimen, I knew the scrub in that area because I went hiking there years ago in grad school and found caterpillars, but I didn’t rear them,” St Laurent says, so that’s where he started.

The first night, he set up four traps resembling tall, narrow tents with a specialized moth-attractive LED inside—the aim being to lure insects to the light. Other insects arrived in the thousands, but no C. albarenicolus.

The second night, he set up at a spot in the nearby Seminole State Forest where the trees open to an expanse of sandy soil and scrubby plants. At 8:49 p.m., “I’m standing there and this kind of pinkish moth comes out of the darkness, and it was very recognizable. Nothing else really looks like that, moth-wise.”

After that first moth, two more came. St Laurent knew he was seeing females, which fly right after sunset, so he collected them and raced them to his colleagues at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Collecting live females means collecting eggs, with the attendant potential of rearing them in the lab. If his colleagues are able to rear them, he says, he will receive progenitors and offspring.

As for seeing a moth that he’d only previously seen as a collection specimen, “I was just like, ‘Wow, I was right! It is here!’ My suspicion is the moth is all over the place in Ocala, but it’s rare and diffuse there. It’s a much more concentrated site in Seminole, surrounded by hardwood hammocks and the St. Johns and Wekiva rivers, so you have a better chance of finding something there.”

The site in the Ocala National Forest is scheduled for a controlled burn associated with Florida scrub jay management, “which is probably good in the overall grand scheme of things,” St Laurent says, “but since we don’t know what the moth eats or when it’s active or its annual lifecycle or habitat requirements, I don’t know if the burning regime is appropriate.

“(The moth is) part of Florida’s multimillion-year history, and Florida is the only place in the world where it occurs. It may not be some top-down species that’s controlling the habitat, but it’s still a very important representative of the one-sixth of its family that’s found in North America, and this one is the only species endemic to the U.S. in this family. It’s a part of Florida heritage and U.S. heritage, and we need to protect it.”

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Preserving the spaces that shaped O’Keeffe’s iconic art

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:00:50 +0000

Preserving the spaces that shaped O’Keeffe’s iconic art Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/21/2026 - 08:00

Cody DeBos

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder MFA alumna Giustina Renzoni considers how to share space and preserve history as director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

In Abiquiú, New Mexico, vast mesas sprawl beneath an expansive blue sky. Among them sit the adobe walls of a home once inhabited by one of America’s most iconic artists. The interior is painted with light and characterized by quiet restraint reminiscent of the natural features outside.

It is here, in the home of Georgia O’Keeffe, that Giustina Renzoni helps visitors see both the artist’s work and the world that shaped it.

“When I first encountered Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiú, what struck me immediately was that it wasn’t just her residence. It was also a remarkable example of vernacular adobe architecture with nearly 200 years of history before she purchased it,” Renzoni says.

Giustina Renzoni, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder MFA alumna, is the director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in New Mexico.

Now, as the director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Renzoni’s day-to-day work involves a careful balance of sharing the space with visitors while also preserving the structure and its layers of history.

A path shaped at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder

Renzoni’s path to her current role began with a long-standing interest in the relationship between art and environment.

“I’ve always been drawn to the intersection of art, history and place,” she says. “Over time, I became especially interested in how artists’ environments shape their creative work.”

After studying art history and visual culture and gaining early experience working in museums, she pursued a Master of Fine Arts at the �鶹��Ѱ��.

“I chose �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder because it offered a program that encouraged interdisciplinary thinking. I was interested in exploring art history alongside visual culture, often through sociohistorical frameworks,” Renzoni says.

She also calls out the collaboration required when working in a museum and recalls how her time at �鶹��Ѱ��helped hone these skills.

“My time at �鶹��Ѱ��helped me develop the ability to think across those disciplines and see how they all contribute to interpreting art and history for the public. That interdisciplinary mindset has been incredibly valuable in my role at the O’Keeffe Museum.”

How place helps us understand art

At the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Renzoni oversees the preservation and interpretation of the Museum’s historic properties—O’Keeffe’s home in the village of Abiquiú and another at Ghost Ranch. The Abiquiú home welcomes thousands of visitors a year, while the Ghost Ranch home is currently closed to the public, awaiting renovations and preservation work Renzoni will head. Her work bridges scholarship and public experience, ensuring the physical spaces connected to O’Keeffe’s life remain protected while also giving visitors a chance to experience them.

Much of her work is rooted in a simple, but powerful, idea: To understand an artist, one must understand where and how they lived.

“Seeing the places where artists lived, the landscapes they looked at every day, and the objects they surrounded themselves with can reveal dimensions of their work that aren’t always visible in a gallery setting. For me, those spaces create a kind of context that brings the artwork to life,” Renzoni says.

The Abiquiú patio, bedroom and zaguán of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. (Photos: Krysta Jabczenski/© Georgia O'Keeffe Museum)

Though the art may be stunning, viewers can’t see the full picture when it is hanging on a featureless white wall.

“Historic spaces show the relationship between creative work and daily life. You see what an artist chose to keep around them, how they organized their studio and how the landscape shaped their perspective,” she says.

For Renzoni, one of the most compelling ways to explore that connection is through her recent exhibition, Artful Living: O’Keeffe & Modern Design, which is currently on view at the museum’s welcome center in Abiquiú.

“The exhibition explores how O’Keeffe transformed her traditional adobe home in Abiquiú into a distinctly modern living environment through furniture, textiles, and design objects,” Renzoni says. “What I find fascinating is that the house itself becomes a kind of three-dimensional expression of her artistic vision.”

Balancing preservation with public access

Preserving this one-of-a-kind environment, however, comes with challenges.

“The biggest is balancing preservation with access,” Renzoni says.

Historic homes like O’Keeffe’s weren’t designed for a steady stream of visitors. Even small interactions can cause lasting damage.

“Things like light exposure, temperature changes and foot traffic can all affect fragile materials,” Renzoni notes.

In Abiquiú, where O’Keeffe’s home is built from earthen adobe, those concerns are even more pronounced. Still, ensuring public access is essential.

“The goal is to create thoughtful ways for people to experience [these spaces] without compromising their long-term preservation,” Renzoni says.

Doing so requires careful coordination across disciplines, from conservation and collections management to education and visitor engagement.

“In a gallery, the artwork is often isolated from that context. In a historic home or studio, you begin to see how art, environment and personal life were all intertwined.”

Reinterpreting O’Keeffe’s legacy 40 years later

Renzoni’s work feels especially timely in 2026, which marks the 40th anniversary of O’Keeffe’s death. Decades later, the artist’s work continues to resonate with audiences around the world.

“I think O’Keeffe resonates because her work feels both deeply personal and universal,” Renzoni says. “Her paintings of New Mexico, in particular, capture a sense of space, light and stillness that many people continue to find compelling today.”

Visiting the places where O’Keeffe lived can also reshape how people understand her work.

“Seeing those environments helps visitors understand that her work was deeply rooted in direct observation and in her relationship with the land,” Renzoni says.

Standing in Abiquiú, visitors witness how the scale of the sky, the geometry of adobe walls and the contours of the surrounding cliffs influenced an icon of American art, grounding her paintings in lived experience.

In the end, the spaces Renzoni preserves offer more than a glimpse into O’Keeffe’s life. They let visitors connect to O’Keeffe’s work on a deeper level, granting an understanding of how her work took shape that can be found nowhere else.

“In a gallery, the artwork is often isolated from that context,” Renzoni says. “In a historic home or studio, you begin to see how art, environment and personal life were all intertwined.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder MFA alumna Giustina Renzoni considers how to share space and preserve history as director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

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Sometimes you just feel like a mango

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:48:12 +0000

Sometimes you just feel like a mango Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/15/2026 - 08:48

Rachel Sauer

In new mid-grade novel Confessions of a Mango, writing team Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow explore the challenges of navigating middle school with a dyslexia diagnosis

Have you ever felt like the mango in a line of lovebirds? Sure, you look like you fit in—same general shape, same red, yellow and green coloring—but, well, you’re a mango and everyone else is a bird.

That’s how Ruby Emmerson feels at Benton Academy, where she’s starting sixth grade with her twin brother, Bryce. But while Bryce is an academic high achiever who likely will excel at the competitive charter school, Ruby’s diagnoses of dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia mean that reading, writing and math are tough for her.

And when she fails her first test at Benton, wow, does she feel like a mango. She even writes a brief blog post about it: “I dont belong at Benton Acadamy. I’m an imposter. I walk beside you in the halls every day. But I’m not smart enuff to stay much longer. Theres so much work. Im failing.”

Nathan Pieplow (left) and Katheryn Lumsden (right) are the authors of Confessions of a Mango, a new mid-grade novel that explores questions of belonging.

Except . . . so many of her classmates relate. Just as readers likely will.

Ruby’s are the confessions in Confessions of a Mango, a mid-grade novel published this week and written by Katheryn Lumsden, a �鶹��Ѱ�� molecular, cellular and developmental biology alumna, and Nathan Pieplow, an associate teaching professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

But for the purposes of this book, they are Kate and Nate, a writing team with way too many ideas and way too little time, and a shared passion for telling honest stories with humor and empathy.

“This is the first creative partnership I’ve been in that works,” Pipelow says. “We bicker like siblings, but the beautiful thing about writing with Katheryn is she’s an idea factory. She can write 2,000 words in an afternoon, then she sends them to me, and I don’t have to start with a blank page.”

“I’m the sloppy copy,” she says.

“I contribute ideas,” he says.

“He’s the atmosphere and the voice. Ironically, Mango didn’t have my voice until he added it.”

It just works, they conclude.

A writing partnership is born

Pieplow and Lumsden met, unsurprisingly, in a Boulder writing group six years ago. Lumsden, a pharmacist by profession, was a longtime group member who wanted a community of support to help her wrangle her boundless ideas. Pieplow, who had authored two field guides to bird sounds, wanted to delve into fiction writing.

“Everyone was like, ‘Why is he here? He doesn’t have plots,’” Lumsden recalls. “But I didn’t have pretty writing and he does, so I decided, ‘I’m gonna ask Nathan if he wants to meet'—for me it was so that he could teach me how to write better, and for him it was so I could teach him how to plot.”

Author event

Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow will talk about Confessions of a Mango Thursday evening at Boulder Bookstore.

What: Book discussion of Confessions of a Mango

Who: Authors Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow

Where: Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl St.

When: 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 16

Reserve a spot

And so, a writing partnership was born. Their first book was a young adult historical fantasy that was good enough to get them their agent, Sarah Fisk, but it wasn’t bought by a publisher. The next novel wasn’t, either.

“If you want to be a fiction writer, you write several (books) and if one doesn’t get published, you move on to the next,” Lumsden says.

“(Confessions of a Mango) is definitely our debut,” Pieplow adds. “The first two were not quite at this level; with our first ones we were playing with form and voice.”

In fact, Fisk told them that the most important thing to get right when writing mid-grade or young adult fiction is the voice, Lumsden says, “and fortunately, voice has always been one of the things I do well.”

The idea for Confessions of a Mango germinated from many seeds. Lumsden grew up in Boulder with a twin brother who, like Bryce, was considered the “smart” one. Lumsden struggled with reading, and their mom, not wanting to make Lumsden feel bad, took both of them for dyslexia testing, explaining it away with “people are interested in twins.”

She did learn to navigate dyslexia, however, so when she was 12, her mom brought home a cake as a sort of “Congratulations for outgrowing dyslexia!” celebration. “Except it wasn’t until much later that I found out you don’t actually outgrow dyslexia,” Lumsden says.

She also read Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz and ideas began percolating. So, when Pieplow went on a birding trip for a month, Lumsden grew impatient waiting for his return and started writing a book.

Making it realistic and relatable

“Part of it was that I was so angry,” she explains. “So often, these kids (diagnosed with dyslexia) don’t know how smart they truly are, and that’s so unfair. Plus, they never see themselves in books because dyslexia just isn’t something that gets written about in mid-grade fiction.

Confessions of a Mango tells the story of Ruby Emmerson, a sixth grader at Benton Academy whose diagnoses of dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia make her feel like she doesn't fit in at the competitive charter school.

“So, when Nathan got back, I sent him what I’d started and he was like, ‘This is actually very good.’”

Lumsden had an advantage because when the two began writing Confessions of a Mango three years ago, her son was 10 and her daughter was 12—she had a front-row seat to the joys and concerns of children entering and navigating middle school.

Pieplow says it was important to them to write a book that was realistic and relatable: The parents may be occasionally clueless, but they want what’s best for their kids. The teachers and administrators at the school are supportive, and the other kids may be squirrelly sometimes, but they’re otherwise normal, decent kids.

“I grew up in Boulder and my husband and I are raising our kids in Boulder, and the parents here are fantastic, but sometimes there can be this feeling of life or death if you don’t do well (in school),” Lumsden says. “There isn’t a lot of room to fail, and people sometimes won’t even say the word ‘fail’ to kids. But it’s important that kids know sometimes they’ll fail and it’s not the end of the world.”

When Fisk began pitching their draft to publishers—after suggesting they excise this chapter and add that chapter, and put in more about Ruby’s quirky best friend, Thea—Little, Brown was the first to make an offer and was the publisher they ultimately chose.

Part of that decision, they say, was the kindness that Little, Brown staff showed them throughout the publishing process—how included they felt in every step and how Little, Brown representatives embraced the dyslexia angle of their story. In fact, Confessions of a Mango is printed in the Lexend font, which improves reading performance and reduces visual stress for people with dyslexia.

They even had a significant say in the vibrant book cover, which shows a girl seated in the shadow of a huge mango with a lovebird perched on its leaf. When they and artist Andy Smith settled on two cover finalists, they asked Lumsden’s son and his friends to vote for their favorite one.

Now, in publication week, a three-year process is finally tangible with the book in readers’ hands. It’s a book close to their hearts, Lumsden says, and they’re proud of the story it tells and the children to whom it gives a literary voice.

But, well, on to the next. They already have several books in progress, and “one of the things I love about working with Katheryn is that eventually we’re going to write something in every genre, because of the exploration of (writing) and how it’s like travel,” Pieplow says. “I love seeing new places, and that’s what I’m doing through the books we’re writing.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about writing and rhetoric? Show your support.

In new mid-grade novel Confessions of a Mango, writing team Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow explore the challenges of navigating middle school with a dyslexia diagnosis.

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