“Publication” Class Notes
Steven Johnson (Grad ’84, Grad ’89)
Steven Johnson (Grad ’84, ’90) has published Jim Londos: The Golden Greek of Professional Wrestling through McFarland Books. The Golden Greek studies a worldwide icon of the Depression era against a backdrop of immigration, athletic entertainment and Greek identity. It is part of McFarland’s series on strength and physical culture. Johnson writes on a contract basis for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, from which he retired as managing editor.
Ross Blankenship (Col ’08 CM)
Ross Blankenship (Col ’08 CM) has published his second book, Everyday Leadership: A Guide to Developing Your Mindset as a Leader. The book aims to help readers integrate their values—the things they care about and are already building their lives around—into how they lead. It presents useful frameworks, key ideas, and practical techniques, all grounded in scientific research, to help leaders improve their day-to-day effectiveness.
Whether someone is stepping into their first leadership role or is an experienced leader looking to expand their scope and skillset, this book serves as an essential resource for gaining greater clarity about leadership. Recognizing that a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t effective, Everyday Leadership encourages readers to develop their own leadership mindset. It provides a foundational overview of what leadership is, what makes leaders effective, and how to think systematically about organizations and teams.
Michael Ross (Col ’70, Law ’77 CM)
Michael Ross (Col ’70, Law ’77 CM) has published volumes eight and nine of his collections of quotations from literary fiction, Ross’s Spiritual Discoveries and Ross’s Literary Discoveries. Ross has been collecting gems from his reading of literary fiction since the 1970s, seeking pithy observations and perspectives from a diverse group of authors across the globe. Quotes are often thought-provoking, humorous, or both. The collections illustrate the value of quotations, introduce readers to authors and books that they do not know, and provide the perfect pocket-sized gift for readers and booklovers.
Michelle Perrin-Steinberg (Col ’01 CM)
Michelle Trong Perrin-Steinberg (Col ’01 CM) has published Kindly, Michelle, a book that seeks to assist law students, early career lawyers, and others with inspiration and encouragement on their journey. The book details her path to becoming chief legal counsel at a global technology company, explaining how she grew up differently and fell into export control and sanctions regulatory compliance. Through family stories—including from her father, Michael T. Perrin (Com ’75 CM)—and practical advice, Perrin-Steinberg explains that uncovering one’s values is key.
Matthew Morris (Col ’16 CM)
Matthew Morris (Col ’16 CM) has published The Tilling, a collection of essays which explores questions of race, identity, family history and love. The book won the 2024 Deborah Tall Lyric Book Prize, founded in 2017 by the editors of Seneca Review to support innovative work in the essay form, including cross-genre and hybrid work, verse forms, text and image, connected or serial pieces, and/or beyond category projects. It was published by Seneca Review Books, an imprint of Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press.
Virginia LeBaron (Nurs ’96 CM)
Virginia LeBaron (Nurs ’96 CM), the Kluge-Schakat associate professor of nursing at the UVA School of Nursing, published her first book, Caring in Context: An Ethnography of Cancer Nursing in India (Routledge Press, 2024). The book is a vivid and compelling account of how most of the world experiences cancer, and how nurses bear witness and respond to the suffering of others when they have little means to help—or for complex reasons, choose not to. Caring in Context has been hailed as “essential reading for clinicians, researchers and policy makers who care about human rights” and a “crucial book for all who are interested in global health.” Caring in Context’s unique perspective and accessible style will appeal to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, from practitioners, academics, and advocates to anyone interested in the complex context of the human experience. The hardback and ebook are available at Routledge Press and the paperback is currently available through the author’s website.
Jessica Beebe (Col ’91 CM)
Jessica Beebe (Col ’91 CM) has published her first novel, Muddy the Water, co-written with her brother, Matt Barrows (Col ’95 CM). Shown from three perspectives, killer, detective, and reporter, Muddy the Water brings readers inside the newsroom of a struggling small newspaper on the bucolic South Carolina coast and speaks to the concept of identity—and whether anyone ever shows their true self.
Jack Bailey (Col ’88 CM)
Jack Bailey (Col ’88 CM) has published Nobody’s Coming: 21 Essential Truths for Taking Control of Your Career, a book for adults aged 18 to 35 in the early stages of their professional lives who want more autonomy but don’t know how to produce it for themselves.
The book offers a collection of wisdom gathered from three decades of experience in the working world. Bailey’s intention is to help others by sharing lessons he learned the hard way that can help others transform their jobs into careers.
Margaret (Peggy) Herring (Col ’74)
M.L.(Peggy) Herring (Col ’74) has published Born of Fire and Rain, an illustrated exploration of the Pacific temperate rainforest, a region of giant trees, exploding mountains, disappearing owls, megafires, tsunamis, and lessons on living on a rapidly changing planet. Published by Yale University Press, the book recalls Herring’s undergraduate work with UVa ecologist Bill Odum, before she migrated to the Pacific Northwest as an ecologist, artist, and writer. This is her seventh book.
mlherring.org
John K. Brown (Grad ’88, Grad ’92 CM)
John K. Brown (Grad ’88, ’92 CM) has published Spanning the Gilded Age: James Eads and the Great Steel Bridge, the daring, improbable story of the construction of the St. Louis Bridge. Begun in 1867 and completed in 1874, it was the first structure of any kind—anywhere in the world—built of steel. Its three graceful arches broke world records for their span lengths; its stone foundations were the deepest yet constructed. It also the story of the career of Eads, one of the most influential engineers of the nineteenth century. Eads not only overcame the physical and technical challenges posed by construction of the bridge but employed equally imaginative design skills to finance the project.
Brown taught history, applied ethics and writing in the UVA School of Engineering’s Department of Engineering and Society from 1992 to 2015.
https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12518/spanning-gilded-age
Brendan Gillen (Com ’06 CM)
Brendan Gillen (Com ’06 CM) has published his debut novel, Static, released via Vine Leaves Press in July.
“A High Fidelity for our millennium…” — Dan LeRoy, author of Dancing to the Drum Machine: How Electronic Percussion Conquered the World and The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (33 1/3)
“Static is a heartfelt, moving debut about the downtown New York music scene.” — Elizabeth Gaffney, author of Metropolis and When the World was Young
“Static reverberates with the drumbeat of why we make art.” — Will Musgrove, author of Asphalt Dreaming
For Paul, stealing is easy. When he’s hungry, he strolls into a bodega and steals lunch. When rent’s due, he steals records and flips them for cash. As a lonely kid growing up in Ohio’s Rust Belt, stealing was the only way he could score the hip hop records and production equipment that fueled his musical dreams.
Now he’s in New York City fighting to keep his once-ascendant band alive and his life from falling apart. His bank account is flatlining. The love of his life has broken his heart. Bunky, his bandmate, is ditching him for Eloise, a soulful vagabond with an intoxicating voice. When financial trouble forces his parents from their lifelong home, Paul ramps up his stealing to save his family from collapse. And in a fever of creativity, he begins to steal from the voices in his life to make the music he’s sure will save his soul.
Set against the modern music industry, where a single social post can change your destiny, Static is alive to the weight of familial expectations, the pursuit of our deepest hopes and dreams, and the struggle to make meaningful connections in the anxiety of the digital age.
Originally from Charlottesville, Gillen is based in Brooklyn, New York and earned his M.F.A at City College. His fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions and appears in the Florida Review, Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, Maudlin House, New Delta Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, and X-R-A-Y, among others. Static has earned coverage in Electric Lit, Write or Die, Full-Stop, and elsewhere. As an Emmy-winning writer/director in the film and advertising space, he has written and creative directed content for ESPN, Conde Nast, Fox Sports, US Open, Anheuser-Busch, Resy, and many other brands. You can find him online at bgillen.com and on Twitter/IG @beegillen.
Gregg Michel (Grad ’89, Grad ’99 CM)
Gregg L. Michel (Grad ’89, ’99 CM) has published Spying on Students: The FBI, Red Squads, and Student Activists in the 1960s South. Published by LSU Press, Spying on Students focuses on the law enforcement campaign against New Left and progressive student activists in the South, particularly white student activists who have often been overlooked in the scholarship of the era. Drawing on formerly secret FBI files and records of other investigative agencies, Spying on Students provides fresh insights on the destructive, broad-based, weaponized surveillance tactics deployed by state actors in their drive to suffocate dissent in the region.
“An important and timely study of the surveillance of white activists in the American South. Using a wealth of new files and sources, Michel deepens our understanding of the intertwined histories of the New Left and law enforcement in the 1960s and 70s. The result is a fascinating read as well as a cautionary tale.” – Beverly Gage, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.
“Spying on Students draws together an impressive amount of original research to offer a perceptive and insightful picture of the ubiquity of southern law enforcement surveillance of liberal activists during the 1960s. Michel’s extremely well-written study features an especially valuable portrait of such practices in Memphis, Tennessee.” — David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
“This well-crafted, engrossing account of government efforts to silence southern activists should warn us of the fragility of democracy, in history and to the present day.” – Michael Honey, author of To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice.
Jordan Dotson (Col ’05)
Jordan Dotson (Col ’05) has published his debut novel, The Ballad of Falling Rock, a work of literary magical realism available on Sept. 24th from BHC Press:
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect hymn. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it died of a broken heart.
Yet, more than anything else folks ponder in the town of Trinity, one question lingers: why did this angel-toned preacher’s son, just as his fame seemed ready to light the Appalachian nightsky forever, disappear completely?
In 1938, the decisions Saul makes will alter his family’s story for generations. He and his eerily talented descendants ignite religious fear throughout Red Pine County. They navigate chapels, decaying sanatoriums, high school hallways, and a lingering myth from their Cherokee heritage that follows them wherever they go.
In the end, however, it’s Saul’s precocious grandson, Eli, who must find answers to these heartbreaking questions, who must enter this world rich in music and voices, where people die to hear the unspoken, and salvation is only found in the not-yet sung.
Dotson was born and raised in Appalachian Virginia. After graduating from UVA, he moved to China to study classical poetry and folk music. Over fourteen years in Asia, he worked as a journalist, musician, and writing teacher, and eventually earned his MFA in Fiction from City University of Hong Kong. His lone co-written screenplay won the Jury Award in Narrative Shorts at more than thirty film festivals worldwide, and though he now teaches in Boston, Jordan still considers Southwest Virginia home.
The Ballad of Falling Rock is available wherever books are sold.
“This was the most beautiful story ever written about the saddest song ever sung. I was taken on a journey across generations where love, family and music, however complicated, overpowered all else. I am absolutely blown away…”
—@Kneecolereads
“Even in the novel’s darkest moments, Dotson’s sentences crackle on every page and are infused with a joy and love for the region and its people. This heartbreaking and tender debut is not to be missed.”
—Sybil Baker, author of Apparitions
“A fabulous, wild, and wonderfully spun tale that invites us to see ‘the world through a pool of tears,’ because everything’s ‘just a story in the end.’ A truly original debut, we look forward to much more from this powerful voice of a very talented writer.”
—Xu Xi, author of That Man In Our Lives
“Dotson’s way with words is absolutely breathtaking. I can hear the characters and feel the music. This is a must read book, without doubt.”
—Goodreads Reviewer
“This song of a novel is the perfect harmony of poetic prose and storytelling, as Saul Crabtree’s legacy unfolds across generations. With an ear for the language of Appalachia, and an eye for sensory and historical details, Dotson’s ‘Ballad’ echoes in the mind and on the heart long after the last song is sung.”
—Amy Clark Spain, author and co-editor of Talking Appalachian
Chanlee Luu (Engr ’17 CM)
Chanlee Luu (Engr ’17 CM) has published her debut poetry collection, The Machine Autocorrects Code to I, coming out on October 8, 2024. It won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House 2024 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize. The book launch will be held at Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C. on October 13.
Luba Shur (Col ’93, Law ’96 CM)
Luba Shur (Col ’93, Law ’96 CM) has authored a new novel, RULE 23, available for preorder on Amazon and Audible. Liar’s Poker meets Legally Blonde and The Devil Wears Prada in this buzzy satire that tells the tale of one of the greatest grifts enshrined as law. There’s a striving, young associate who’s the book’s antiheroine, a ruthless senior partner eager to exploit her ambition, and a legal system that enables their diabolical schemes like tracks enable a runaway train. Kiiri Sandy—who brought to brilliant life recent hits by David Baldacci, Ruth Reichl, and Maud Ventura—shines as the narrator.
Shur received a B.A. in economics and international relations from UVA and a J.D. from its School of Law, where she served on the Law Review and earned Order of the Coif honors. She launched her career as a two-time federal judicial law clerk and built her career in private practice, at two preeminent BigLaw firms, including tenure as an associate, a counsel, and an equity partner specializing in complex litigation and other dispute resolution. Following these positions, Luba worked as a media law attorney at a government agency and currently works as a broad-based in-house general counsel. She lives in the Washington, D.C. area along with two children, one husband, and zero dogs.
Charles Blair (Col ’87, Law ’91 CM)
Charles (Tom) Blair (Col ’87, Law ’90 CM) is a contributing author in the volume of essays Lynching in Virginia: Racial Terror and Its Legacy. Growing up in Rockingham County, Blair, who is an attorney in private practice in Washington, D.C., developed an abiding interest in Civil War and Reconstruction-era history. Although not as associated with lynching as other southern states, Virginia has a tragically extensive history with these horrific crimes. This important volume examines the more than one hundred people who were lynched in Virginia between 1866 and 1932. Its diverse set of contributors—including scholars, journalists, activists, and students—recover this wider history of lynching in Virginia, interrogate its legacy, and spotlight contemporary efforts to commemorate the victims of racial terror across the commonwealth. Together, their essays represent a small part of the growing effort to come to terms with the role Virginia played in perpetuating America’s national shame.
Josh Pons (Col ’76)
Josh Pons (Col ’76 CM) has published his third book, Letters from Country Life: Adolphe Pons, Man o’ War, and the Founding of Maryland’s Oldest Thoroughbred Farm, a recounting of his grandfather’s role as personal secretary to New York financier August Belmont II, breeder of the greatest racehorse of the 20th-century, Man o’ War.
The narrative follows Pons’ grandfather from New York to Maryland in 1933 to establish Country Life Farm, which at nine decades old is the oldest thoroughbred farm in Maryland.
In writing the book, Pons took to heart the words of former professor John Coleman, a member of the UVA Department of English faculty from 1946 to 1981, who taught students that “unless something is written down, there is no proof that it existed.”
Pons’ book is available in bookstores, at rowmanlittlefield.com, or by contacting him at josh@countrylifefarm.com.
William Matthew Ruberry (Col ’76)
William Matthew Ruberry (Col ’76) has published Harmony in Black and White, released in October by Doggy Dog World Publishing. Ruberry was a reporter for the Greenville (S.C.) News, then an award-winning reporter and editor for the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch. This is his first novel.
The book is set in Richmond and Charlottesville. Here is the description:
Jack Sullivan is a rookie reporter at the Messenger newspaper in Richmond, Virginia. When he’s assigned to the local police beat, he never expects to uncover a network of crime amid the systemic racism enshrined in the city’s Confederate history.
As the young journalist pulls at the threads of a story that spans from a record high in city homicides to interstate arms running, he is forced to confront the prejudices that color his young life and career.
Inspired by the author’s own reporting in the wake of the march by white supremacists in Charlottesville and the murder of George Floyd, Harmony in Black and White is an unflinching newsroom drama and an examination of the impact of race and implicit biases on our media, law enforcement, and the systems that govern them.
James Wilson (Grad ’06, Grad ’11)
James Wilson (Grad ’06, ’11) has published America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan. Wilson could not have written the book without the “amazing” experience of completing a Ph.D. in American History at UVA from 2005 until 2011 with Melvyn P. Leffler, Edward Stettinius Professor of History, Emeritus.
Andrew Lee (Col ’85, Med ’89 CM)
Andrew G. Lee, M.D. (Col 85, Med 89 CM) published the second edition of his textbook, Emergencies in Neuro-ophthalmology. Dr. Lee served this year (2023-2024) as president of the Houston Ophthalmological Society and president of the Houston Neurological Society.
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