When Bud Welch lost his 23-year-old daughter, Julie, in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, he was consumed by grief at the loss of his only daughter and rage toward the perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh. Over time, however, Welch discovered that his anger wasn’t helping him to heal. Connecting with McVeigh’s father, Bill, he found peace and argued against McVeigh’s execution. Jeanne Bishop ’81, ’84 JD, a Cook County assistant public defender, explores the friendship between these two fathers in her new book, Grace from the Rubble: Two Fathers’ Road to Reconciliation After the Oklahoma City Bombing (2020). Bishop has dealt with tragedy in her own life. She lost her sister, Nancy, her brother-in-law and the couple’s unborn child to murder in 1990. Bishop’s first book, Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy and Making Peace with My Sister’s Killer (2015), discusses her journey toward forgiveness.
A Queer, Black-Centered Love Story for the Ages
A year out of Northwestern, Keith Miller ’10 was working at a youth mentoring organization and moonlighting as a model in New York City when he wrote a manuscript focused on Jay, a queer African American young man coming of age in the Deep South in the early 2000s. Now that manuscript is the basis for an animated short film and a two-book deal with Harper Collins.
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