Class Notes

Morgan Flowers (Col ’19 CM) has been recognized with a 2023 CoVaBIZ Next Gen Award. The awards recognize successful young professionals making a difference in their industries in Coastal Virginia.

Flowers is development associate for The Lawson Companies, a vertically-integrated real estate firm based in Norfolk, Virginia specializing in the development, construction, and management of multifamily housing communities in Virginia.

Flowers is primarily accountable for third-party due diligence, architectural and civil design management, green building program implementation, permitting, and owner’s representative during construction.

Will Sexauer (Com ’19 CM) has been recognized with a 2023 CoVaBIZ Next Gen Award. The awards recognize successful young professionals making a difference in their industries in Coastal Virginia.

Sexauer is acquisitions manager for The Lawson Companies, a vertically-integrated real estate firm based in Norfolk, Virginia specializing in the development, construction, and management of multifamily housing communities in Virginia.

He is accountable for sourcing Lawson’s new development projects, evaluating financial feasibility, conceptual project design, the entitlement process, broker and seller relationships, and contract management.

James Patrick Guy II (Col ’87, Law ’90 CM) has been chosen president-elect of the southern chapter of the Energy Bar Association  for the 2023-24 bar year and will serve as its president in 2024-25. He previously served as southern chapter president in 2010-11 and was the 128th president of the Virginia Bar Association in 2016. 

Guy is general counsel to Mecklenburg Electric Cooperative and its affiliates, EMPOWER Broadband Inc. and EMPOWER Telecom Inc. He also was appointed to the Virginia State Air Pollution Control Board by Gov. Glenn Youngkin in 2022 and serves as Board Chairman.

The Energy Bar Association (EBA) is an international, non-profit association of attorneys, energy professionals, and students active in all areas of energy law.  EBA has seven regional chapters across the U.S. and one in Canada. The Southern Chapter comprises the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. 

John Ragosta (Law ’84, Grad ’08) has published his fourth book, For the People, For the Country: Patrick Henry’s Final Political Battle (UVA Press). In 1799, at the behest of President George Washington, Patrick Henry came out of retirement to thwart Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and the radical states’ rights agenda of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. Washington and Henry believed that their opponents were putting party over country and threatening the still fragile union. Rebuking Jefferson and Madison, Henry insisted that in a democracy change must occur “in a constitutional way” or monarchy threatened. 

For the People, For the Country tells the remarkable story of how the most eloquent public speaker of the American Revolutionary era and the leading antifederalist during debates over ratification of the Constitution reemerged from retirement to defend the Constitution that he had opposed, but that had been adopted by his co-citizens. Much more than a fire-breathing demagogue, the Patrick Henry we encounter here comes to life as a principled leader of the young nation who believed above all in working with a government elected by the people, advocating for political change in “a constitutional way”—at the ballot box. 

Caroline Rayner (Col ’13) published her first book, The Moan Wilds, in May 2023. Published by Shabby Doll House, The Moan Wilds consists of one long poem, and Caroline describes what it’s about like this: “Lighting fireworks in the yard during a party, then escaping into the house to cut your hair in the bathtub, or down the road to where everyone promised you could perfectly see the moon. Sharing a bottle of wine while riding through the Blue Ridge Mountains in the back of a station wagon with no air conditioning and nothing but weather and sports on the radio. Writing each other’s names on the windows with melting lipstick. Putting glitter on your eyes. Crossing your legs over her legs to make a move on a giant rock in the river. Getting blood on your dress. Sweating in pink sheets until noon with someone you got to sing ‘Someday I Will Treat You Good’ then ‘Trains Across the Sea’ then ‘Farewell Transmission’ with at karaoke. Yelling on the phone from the porch about a psychedelic kind of light coming in like water but also like velvet through the magnolia that everyone needs to see to believe and we can make a whole goddamn night out of it if someone goes to get more wine.”

Selah Saterstrom says, “THE MOAN WILDS is a queer feast…Caroline Rayner can write lines that stop your heart, or rather, relocate it.” Dara Barrois/Dixon says, “Here we have a book of the excruciating intoxication of passionate, ardent, not altogether unrequited love…Rayner’s not holding anything back and the music of her words and the beauty of her soul makes it all bearable.” Ocean Vuong says, “Steeped in the hybrid and maximalist tradition of C.D. Wright, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley, The Moan Wilds nevertheless forges a path so inimitable it becomes the very thumbprint of its author, which to me is the crowning achievement of any book worth its salt. Here Rayner has produced an indelible and unforgettable voice, full of heart, intelligence, hunger and a wildness that shakes us into new, hallucinatory order.”

Excerpts from The Moan Wilds can be found online in Annulet, Black Warrior Review, b l u s h, KEITH LLC, and Peach Mag. An interview with Caroline about THE MOAN WILDS can be found in The Millions.

Lucas Hobbs (Law ’98 CM) was elected as secretary of the Association of District Court Judges of Virginia at the Association’s annual meeting in August.  He serves as a General District Court Judge in the 28th Judicial District.

Shira Lurie (Grad ’19) will publish her first book, The American Liberty Pole: Popular Politics and the Struggle for Democracy in the Early Republic, with UVA Press in October. Lurie is an assistant professor of history at Saint Mary’s University.

Frank S. Macgill (Com ’91), a partner at HunterMaclean, a law firm with offices in Savannah and St. Simons Island, Georgia, was recently selected for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America© 2024. Founded in 1983, Best Lawyers is an annual publication that recognizes attorneys for outstanding achievements in their areas of practice. Attorneys are selected through peer-review surveys that have been completed by thousands of leading lawyers who confidentially evaluate their peers. 

Christopher Corbett (Col ’78 CM) and Phillip Fowler (Educ ’78 CM), first-year roommates at Humphreys Dorm in 1974, reconnected on July 22, 2023. They had not seen each other since 1978. Corbett was a resident advisor for three years and Fowler for two.