People & Profiles
Released this spring, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life provides the most complete account to date of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, his relationships, his brilliantly strategic mind and his flaws. Eig’s biography draws on hundreds of interviews with King’s family, close friends and others who knew him; thousands of FBI documents that have been declassified in recent years — White House phone recordings, personal letters, unaired TV footage; and other previously unpublished materials.
Growing up in the Bay Area, Nicholas Koo ’18 MMus, ’22 DMA sang in choirs and played guitar, clarinet, saxophone and piano, but he studied molecular cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, with the goal of becoming a doctor. But after seeing the university’s orchestra perform during his senior year, he decided to reignite a lifelong passion and enrolled for a fifth year to pursue what he’d wanted to do all along.
On her final day at WBZ-TV in Boston in July 1965, reporter Joanne Desmond ’58 heard that the old news reels were going to be destroyed, so she asked her news director if she could take a roll of film from her reporting on the Boston Strangler. Her news director obliged, and that film clip was restored and featured in Hulu’s 2023 film Boston Strangler, which stars Keira Knightley as Desmond’s real-life news counterpart Loretta McLaughlin.
Looking for a place to pitch a story about Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters in December 2020, journalism student Dan Hu discovered The Yappie, a digital news publication focused on activism and policies affecting the AAPI community. Soon after that initial pitch, Hu joined The Yappie as a writer and is now its executive director.
Pulitzer Prize–finalist playwright discusses his Evanston-inspired off-Broadway play and what it’s like to write for the hit HBO show ‘Succession.’
Based on decades of research, professor Viorica Marian shares remarkable benefits of knowing more than one language, from delaying Alzheimer’s disease to improving cognitive performance. Marian’s 2023 book, The Power of Language, will be translated from English to 10 other languages.
As members of the Northwestern University Black Alumni Association (NUBAA) mingled at the Black House during Homecoming and Reunion Weekend in 2022, Charla Wilson hoped the alumni would find some familiar faces in her photo display of Black student life at the University. Wilson, who is Northwestern’s archivist for the Black experience, had recently launched a crowdsourcing campaign called “I know them!” to learn more about 1,400 images from the past six that depict Black student life on campus.
Joanna Bush ’99 is a top concept artist and film illustrator in Hollywood who has helped bring to life Oscar-winning films like Life of Pi and La La Land. She has collaborated with filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh, Ang Lee, Jordan Peele, Zach Braff ’97, Tyler Perry, and more, while crediting the Northwestern student group Section 22 for giving her a start in film.
As a dentist and an educator, Juliann Bluitt Foster blazed a trail. First, she earned a degree from Howard University College of Dentistry in 1962, when a tiny fraction of U.S.
Few events bring together the Northwestern community across the ages like the inauguration of a new president. Through the decades and across generations, inaugurations have offered the opportunity to come together, not only to reflect on the progress of the University, but also to chart a course for its future.
