Arts & Entertainment
To this day I’m still not sure how I managed, as an RTVF major, to weasel my way into Craig Kinzer’s sophomore acting class. I never even wanted to be an actor, but I knew filmmaking involved working with actors, so I talked my way into the class.
After graduating from Northwestern with an undergraduate business degree, Alan Tripp ’37 worked in broadcasting and advertising, at one point running his own ad agency. Now, from his retirement home in Bryn Mawr, Pa., the 102-year-old has achieved a lifelong dream with the release of Senior Song Book — a mix of ’40s- and ’50s-style tunes with modern lyrics that he calls “grown-up music.”
John Stoops performed with Second City and then joined Boom Chicago, a comedy club and improv group founded by Northwestern alumni in Amsterdam. Now Stoops runs The Revival, a theater and education company that focuses on improvisational skills.
Northwestern theater alumnus Austin Harvey, an advanced cicerone and curator and co-owner at Beermiscuous, shares his favorite new beer trends.
On a Saturday afternoon in late March, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Genevieve Thiers ’04 MMus opens the balcony doors of her home in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. She sets her iPhone on a music stand and cues up the app that will be her accompaniment.
Jasmine Warga ’10 won a John Newbery Honor in January for her recent book "Other Words from Home," a story about a 12-year-old Syrian refugee named Jude who lives in Ohio with her mother while her father and brother remain in Syria. The award-winning young adult author shares how her family’s immigrant background shapes her writing.
Kristen Schaal ’00 makes an indelible impression. Her sweet, singsong and slightly manic voice belies the many comically subversive roles she has played, but no matter how sly her portrayals, you always feel like Schaal is letting you in on the joke.
Northwestern alumni and faculty were well represented at the 62nd annual Grammy Awards. The all-alumni quartet Third Coast Percussion was nominated for the second time, for best chamber music/small ensemble performance for Perpetulum (the group won the award in the same category in 2017).
Kevin Salwen had a question: How did Richard Jewell, a man who should be lauded as an American hero, become convicted in the court of public opinion and forever remembered as the primary suspect in the Atlanta Olympic bombings? Salwen ’79, a former Wall Street Journal columnist and editor, and his co-author, former US attorney Kent Alexander, spent more than five years digging into that question for their narrative nonfiction book, The Suspect.
In the mid-1990s Mike Stanton ’82 MS shared a Pulitzer Prize as a member of the Providence Journal investigative team, a role that put him in constant contact with one of America’s most notorious mayors, Buddy Cianci. The charismatic but felonious architect of the Providence renaissance became the subject of Stanton’s debut book, New York Times best-seller The Prince of Providence (2003).
