All writers have to start somewhere. The young wordsmiths in Queen’s Creative Writing Camp began their journey into the literary world early with the English Department. Last summer, they came to Queens for a week of fiction, poetry, and fun. The program, led by English Professor Sarah Creech, offers rising 7th to 9th graders an exciting opportunity to combine the college experience of a Creative Writing major on campus with a traditional summer camp, where they will explore the craft of storytelling both on and off the page.

Izzy Harvey, ’23, a Creative Writing and Psychology major, was a camp counselor in 2021. Her mother worked as a kindergarten teacher and also taught horseback riding, so she had previous experience with summer camps in Georgia. Harvey said she really enjoyed being able to have a bit of a leadership role outside of classes: “It was nice to take what I’d learned in the classroom in my academics and apply that to teach middle school students and get them on board with Creative Writing.”

Professor Sarah Creech, author of the novels The Whole Way Home and Season of The Dragonflies, pitched the idea after the faculty saw the need for a Creative Writing camp. The unprecedented events of 2020 meant the camp’s first year would be held virtually, making last year extra special for campers and counselors alike.

It began as a combination of university and personal interests, a way to give back to the community and inspire budding writers to share their stories in a relaxed, homework-free space, to replace the academic pressure of perfection or grades with joy, Creech said. Part of the inspiration came from her own positive experiences in childhood.

Prof. Creech said, “I started writing in elementary school, fourth grade or fifth grade, and really took off in middle school. It was a very creative period for me, and I had great teachers who encouraged Creative writing in the classroom, and I think I wanted to give back.”

While helping run the camp, Harvey and Alison Schwai, ’21, got to take trips to nearby Freedom Park, read students’ fanfictions, as well as help them perform their own work at the showcase, like plays and spoken word.

When asked about the creative benefits of writing outside in Freedom Park, Professor Creech said: “Freedom, it’s in the name, right? It was a beautiful day, too. We really lucked out with the weather, but I wanted the students to be inspired by nature, and not be confined by four walls, especially after being quarantined.” 

Creech added, “They probably associate that with what their school life is like, and I wanted them to walk around, to move their legs outside. But really it was just for fun, to be silly.”

Students were encouraged to explore many different mediums of work, including science fiction, fantasy, Marvel comics, and even the hit Netflix show Stranger Things. For Summer 2022, the camp will be held in McEwen, home of the English Department. To those who may be interested in signing up, Professor Creech invites them to “come give it a try! There are really kind and interesting kids that you’ll get to meet, and there’s going to be a lot of different activities. It’s a very hands-on camp.”

If you want to be a part of this year’s camp (June 20 – 24), parents can register their campers at the following link:https://www.queensacademiccamps.com/content/creative-writing-camp.

by Lara Boyle

The stories of immigrants and refugees often go unheard. But one group of students has helped make those stories heard. Last fall, students in the Migrations Queens Learning Community (QLC) learned how the understanding of and education about immigrants, refugees, and the programs designed to assist them are often scarce.

Their stories and topics of migration and forced displacement can often feel distant to many of us here in the U.S., especially if we’ve never had first-hand experience with them. A lack of knowledge persists about these topics, despite the fact that over 17,000 refugees are estimated to have been resettled in Charlotte alone over the past few decades. This knowledge gap was part of the reason the Migrations QLC was created at Queens.

When they first started the QLC in 2015, Dr. Sarah Griffith of the History department and Dr. Margaret Commins of the Political Science department made it clear that they wanted students to engage directly with these stories of immigration and displacement. “We could sit in the classroom all day… and talk about this abstract experience people go through,” says Dr. Griffith, who teaches a class in the QLC on the history of migration, “but I didn’t want an abstract thing because you don’t feel connected to it.”

Instead, students in the Migrations QLC went out into Charlotte to work with some of the city’s organizations involved in refugee and immigrant resettlement. “Students can choose the agency they want to work with,” Dr. Griffith explains. “Their work might be anything from mentoring high school boys and girls, refugee youth…to working in the International House, where they help prepare people to take the citizenship exam.”

Getting this direct experience with immigrants and the programs related to them gives students an understanding of how they work, and the ways in which the programs fall short. But more than that, it humanizes the stories these people have to tell. Another professor in the Migrations QLC, Dr. Bonnie Shishko of the English department, explores the many stories of displacement in her class.

“I wanted to look at migration through the lens of narrative,” explains Dr. Shishko. “One of the goals in that class is to expose students to personal experiences and narratives of migration, but also for students to understand the traumas that come with displacement.” Through this course, students come to understand both the importance of these stories and the traumas that can complicate them. These stories are often difficult to share, and the least we can do is listen when people want to share them.

That’s what the Migrations QLC plans to focus on moving forward. Students will still work with immigrants in the Charlotte community, now with the goal of helping get their stories heard. For Fall 2022, the QLC group will host several more classes on the topics of migration and the stories associated with displacement. If you’re looking for a learning community that offers hands-on experience with community outreach and understanding of our systems around immigration, considering signing up!

And if you’re interested in other ways to help Charlotte’s refugee and immigrant communities, check out some of the nonprofit organizations these classes have partnered with. Have a look at their websites through the links below:

ourBRIDGE: https://www.joinourbridge.org/

GenOne: https://www.genoneclt.org/our-vision

International House: https://sharecharlotte.org/nonprofit/international-house

by Connor Lindsay

It started at Queens as a visual arts project to promote local Latino/a/x artists. Arte Latino Now, the brainchild of Dr. Michele Shaul and Dr. Siu Challons-Lipton, now furthers and deepens the visibility of Latino/a/x artists in the Charlotte area and beyond. Dr. Shaul, director of the Center for Latino Studies and a professor of Spanish, says she remembers when “there was a point in time where you couldn’t get published if you were doing Latino/a/x scholarship.” 

Starting as a passion project, Arte Latino Now was originally a locally based curation of art by individuals that identify as Latino/a/x aimed at creating a space to represent the multifaceted nature of Latino/a/x art. Arte Latino Now has become a 10-year-old project, and it has now evolved into a nationwide platform for Latino/a/x artists. Dr. Shaul stresses that “submissions from all over the country expanded us from just visual art to even more.” 

As submissions continued to roll in, Dr. Challons-Lipton, professor of Art History, and Dr. Shaul recognized that Arte Latino Now could become more than just a platform for visual art. It could be a space for individuals to see themselves represented. The expansion from strictly visual art to a space that explores music, literature, dance, and more has allowed the project to blossom. This expansion has allowed Arte Latino Now to achieve their goal of “highlighting the wide range of performance and production in the broader [Latino/a/x] community,” Shaul says.

She has also relied on her “passion project” in her Spanish classes here at Queens as a teaching supplement. “By showing students the diversity that exists within the Latino/a/x community,” she says, students are able to engage more deeply with the content. It also provides students a space to further their learning on their own behalf. 

Basing Arte Latino Now out of Queens has allowed the Queens community a space to blend with new cultures, ideas, and representations. It has also given students and community members a space to see themselves represented – a key mission of Arte Latino Now. 

Arte Latino Now exists on its online platform for the foreseeable future. Discover its current virtual exhibition, performances, and readings at centerforlatinostudiesquclt.dropmark.com/945645

To view the Facebook page, please find them at https://www.facebook.com/ArteLatinoNowAtQueensUniversityOfCharlotte

To learn more about the Latino studies at Queens, go to queens.edu/about/centers/center-for-latino-studies.html

by Chase Mauerhan

Over the summer, Biology majors Daxx McGee and Chloe Linton had the unique opportunity to pursue two research projects under the supervision of Dr. Kira McEntire. The Biology Department sponsored these two projects to help students to explore interests and assist on research within the department.

Daxx McGee, a senior Biology major, conducted research that Dr. McEntire had started. Daxx said, “Essentially, we were investigating whether color pattern (specifically red coloration) on common garter snakes could be linked to resultant toxicity they acquire through their diet of toxic newts, making it a form of aposematism, where animals signal their toxicity to would-be predators. We were able to investigate this through the geographic distribution of the snake’s color through data sourced from the citizen-science app iNaturalist.” 

He also mentioned how worthwhile the project was:  “I think the most salient thing I learned was simply the chance to have an up-close, and real-life look into how scientific inquiry occurs; seeing and doing this process first-hand was wonderful.”

Dr. McEntire stressed how important it is for students to be paid for their hard work: “I was able to give Daxx a stipend for summer research through my Noble Fellowship Grant. I think it is incredibly important students get paid for summer research because it shows them that what they are doing is valuable.” Chloe’s project was supported by a Jim Rogers Summer Institute Summer for Research and Creative work grant.

Chloe Linton, a senior Biology major, also had the opportunity to pursue a research project. She worked closely with Dr. McEntire to monitor the temperature in water tubs where water lilies grew. This project grew out of a news article she’d read detailing whether or not water lilies affected water temperature. She decided to take a deeper dive after reading up and finding little evidence to support the claim. She is currently working on her Capstone and independent research.

by Izzy Harvey

We Welcome our New Writer

We’re happy to announce that Lara Boyle, junior Creative Writing major, has joined the staff of the CAS Success Blog. Please read on to find out more about Lara.

Who Am I?

Hi! I’m Lara Boyle, a junior Creative Writing major here at Queens!

How has Queens supported me in this first semester (Fall 2021) when everyone is back?

I have been introduced to new passions within the English department like Queer Theory, as well as a great community of like-minded people from different backgrounds who all share a love of literature and storytelling! My professors have each been incredibly supportive of my journey in publishing original work, which has helped to conquer imposter syndrome. Besides my creative pursuits, the Accessibility Services at Queens offers a great support system for disabled students that has really allowed me to flourish since I transferred here in my freshman year during 2020!

What am I looking forward to in 2022?

 I’m really looking forward to all of my classes this year and being back on campus with my friends! My goal for 2022 is to read more classics, so I’m excited to dive into The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov next—it’s my first foray into Russian literature!

Who am I?
I’m Connor Lindsay, a Creative Writing major from Raleigh, North Carolina. I’m also minoring in Psychology. It’s a super interesting combination that lets me learn and then write about mental health, a subject often covered inaccurately in the media. I want to write stories that reduce the stigma our society has around mental health, and the classes I’ve taken here so far have helped me do just that.

How has Queens supported me in this first semester when everyone is back?
I appreciated the events Queens held this semester, like the ghost tours and holiday gatherings, because they allowed us to get together with friends and have fun in a COVID-safe environment. They provided a bit of normalcy in an otherwise very abnormal year. I also really enjoyed the classes I got to take. For me, they were the first in-person courses I took at Queens, and I enjoyed being back in the classroom.

What am I looking forward to in 2022?
I’ll be able to take a JBIP trip to Italy at the end of this upcoming semester, which I’m looking forward to. Getting to learn about art and creators from the Renaissance era will no doubt be the highlight of my year. I’m also excited to get more experience writing and publishing, both through the CAS Success blog and through the Queens Chronicle.

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Hi there! I’m Chase Mauerhan (they/she), a junior here at Queens, and a double major in Creative Writing and Professional Writing and Rhetoric. Hailing from Charleston, SC, I have recently joined the team here at Queens as a transfer student.

I’m really excited to step back into the world of learning this semester because of the slew of incredible professors that have helped support me in my journey through higher education. The professors at Queens have truly made my adjustment to a new college and city a worthwhile one. The professors within the English department have encouraged and supported my creative endeavors while simultaneously providing a challenging and stimulating environment. 

looking forward to producing more work that I am proud of. My goal for the year is to constantly push my own creative boundaries and to dig deeper within all styles of my writing. I’m also really looking forward to (and terrified of) this summer because I am going backpacking in Alaska for 30 days!! Fingers crossed that I get some good poetry out of being in the middle of nowhere with a group of strangers.

Dr. Barry Robinson, a professor in the History Department, is no stranger to participating in public history mapping projects. His background is in the history of Latin America and the Atlantic World, but he is also interested in applying geospatial analysis to the service of public history. He has previously worked on other public history mapping projects with the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor and with Aberystwyth University in Wales.

In the fall of 2020, Queens alumna Colette Brooke, knowing of Dr. Robinson’s interest in mapping and archival research, reached out to him about starting a partnership between the History Department and the Catawba Nation. 

Students began their work on the Catawba Archaeology Student Internship Experience (CASIE) in the spring of 2021. Their work centered around digitizing archaeological records from the Catawba Reservation and Cultural Center, and, as Dr. Robinson said, “organizing them into a robust spreadsheet database, and then georeferencing that spreadsheet database and turning it into an interactive digital map so that the members of the Tribal Historic Preservation Office and Cultural Center staff would have access to where archaeological work has been done in the past.” The creation of this private database allowed the Catawba Nation to more efficiently determine where future work needed to be done, and the first phase of this partnership culminated in the delivery of a private mapping tool currently in use by the Catawba Tribal Historic Preservation Office.

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The second phase of the partnership with the Catawba Nation is set to take place in spring of 2022. Students will be able to participate in paid internship opportunities to work with the Tribal Historic Preservation Office, Tribal Archive, Cultural Center, and Community Library. Additionally, students can work on a public-facing mapping project that Robinson said will “create a work of public history that can be housed with the Catawba Cultural Center’s online presence but will help educate the general public in the Charlotte region about Catawba history and culture in the area.” Interns will also work on identifying artifacts that were found in a particular location, like pottery shards and arrowheads, and cross-referencing these materials with the developing database of sites to “identify which artifacts go with which sites in the digital record” that is being created, Robinson added.

When discussing the significance of this project, Dr. Robinson explained that it “helps acknowledge the cultural and historical context in which the university is set.”  

To facilitate the development of this public-facing map, Dr. Robinson is offering a course in the spring called HST 400: Applied Historical Geography. The internship application for CASIE is currently open, and Queens students from any discipline are encouraged to apply. 

by Emily Iknayan

Collaboration is the lifeblood for one Biology department professor and his students. Dr. Scott Weir said, “I came here to work in the lab with students.” With his academic focus in environmental toxicology (the study of how toxins affect the environment, including reptiles and amphibians), Dr. Weir is able to concentrate on teamwork in the lab with students. 

Sparked by the Writing for Biologists class, one student, Monica Youssif, grew to love scientific writing.  Over the summer, funding from the Jim Rogers Summer Institute allowed for the cultivation of a relationship between professor and student that began in the Writing for Biologists class, as both had the identifiable goal of helping the environment.  

Their research and diligence this summer has led to another benefit: publication. Youssif, a junior Health Science major, and Weir have already nearly finished their first joint publication for a book about toxicity methods in reptiles. The book chapter has been accepted for publication, and they will both be listed as authors among other PhD advisors and students.  

This is not the first time Dr. Weir has collaborated with students on scientific endeavors. Alum Leah Graham will be presenting with Dr. Weir at the North American Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. Senior Chloe Linton’s work with plants is part of a larger project at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory to understand wetland reclamation. Another senior capstone project for Adelina Lipton evaluates Carolina Raptor Center raptors with neurologic symptoms that may be due to long-banned organochlorine insecticides.  

Dr. Weir described working with students in the lab as some of the most fulfilling experiences he’s had at Queens. He added that Queens’ being able to provide funding has allowed a sense of mutual respect to blossom. It was Youssif’s willingness, he noted, that led to the success of their project. Youssif mentioned enthusiasm and dedication as the foundation for the success of their project. Both will continue to work and hope to publish another peer-reviewed article within a couple years. 

by April Markowski

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Before we humans wrote poetry, we recited it aloud. And renowned poet Ada Limón showed the Charlotte community the power and beauty of the oral tradition by reading her own work last month. The English Department Reading Series, the Arts at Queens, and Charlotte Center for Literary Arts (Charlotte Lit) hosted students, faculty, staff, and community members in the Gambrell Center’s Sandra Levine Theatre.

People piled into the theatre to hear Limón read, listening to her poems about anything from horses birthing tinier horses, to living in New York under an esteemed fellowship, to the bonds of fathers and step-fathers. She lit up the room, and several Queens students sat right up front to listen to her speak, hanging on to every word in admiration.

Professor Julie Funderburk of the English Department, the faculty liaison for Arts at Queens, recognized the importance of the reading: “Faculty value bringing exciting writers to campus like Limón to give students more voices for their own work… There’s also value in connecting the educational mission of Arts at Queens with the community, to share learning opportunities with Charlotteans and also to expose Queens students to the energy of those focused on lifelong learning.”

Ada Limón has an established relationship with Queens: she teaches in the MFA program. She is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying (2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. The poetry weekend with Ada Limón was also a success for community outreach at Queens. The English Department Reading Series and the Arts at Queens worked in concert with Charlotte Lit to produce this inspiring programming. Also, as part of Charlotte Lit’s 4x4CLT poster release series, at the reading artist Laurie Smithwick presented four works of art related to Limón’s poetry.

The reading was the first half of a poetry weekend (Sept 10-11). Limón followed up the reading with a master class, “The Art of Conjuring: Making Something Out of Nothing” in Charlotte Lit’s auditorium. Besides several community members, select Queens students secured spots in the workshop: Lara Boyle, April Markowski, Cooper Knight, Sophia Russano, Anna Julia Vissioli Rodrigues, Ellie Fritsch, Connor Lindsay, Tyler Barnette, and Chase Mauerhan.

In the workshop, these Queens students introduced themselves and gave some background on their poetry, as well as asked questions and advice. In the workshop, the writers engaged with themselves in their pieces, drawing on their experiences and settings to produce poems in the moment. Several people read excerpts of what they wrote and were greeted with smiles of pride around the room.

Limón stood at the front, directing feedback and assuring everyone that no matter where they were in the poem, it was never finished until you were content with what you had written. She said that she revised poems several times over the course of months before she felt connected to it as a finished product.

One workshop participant, Junior Sophia Russano, reflected on her experience: “It was a great way to bridge the gap between the classroom and the real world and really apply what we learned. My favorite piece of advice that Limón gave was that the first few drafts/ideas are supposed to be messy. I also liked that she called the ideas we started writing on in response to the prompts ‘seeds.’”

By Izzy Harvey

Taking on the charge of being a professor-scholar is no small feat. Dr. Caroline Grego of the History Department has done just that as she’s engaged in active scholarship to transform her dissertation into a book.

Her first book, Hurricane of the New South: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Jim Crow Lowcountry, will be published in Fall of 2022 by the University of North Carolina Press. There were various inspirations for her dissertation-turned-book, including her parents instilling her with an interest in local and Southern history as a youth growing up in South Carolina and her conversations in graduate school with Peter Wood, who was an Emeritus Professor at Duke University and is an expert on South Carolina history about this particular storm. 

Besides her scholarship for the book, Dr. Grego is also a dedicated professor in the classroom. She describes Queens students as “enthusiastic and dedicated” as “they care deeply about their coursework and about sort of engaging their whole selves with what they learn in class” and applying it to the world around them.

Queens has provided some professional development funding for Dr. Grego. She virtually presented “Draining the Lowcountry of its Black Majority: Environmental and racial engineering in the Jim Crow Lowcountry,” a paper based on Part Three of the book, at the 2021 Agricultural History Society’s annual conference. She will also be requesting funding from Queens to pay for an indexer for the book.

One of the book’s central tenets is that “natural disasters aren’t natural.” Reinforcing this point, Dr. Grego argues that “Jim Crow for African Americans was the disaster as much as the hurricane, and that the hurricane ends up coalescing with Jim Crow in many ways.”

“It’s not an uncontested battle, and one of the main points that I make here is that African Americans in the [South Carolina] Lowcountry who are most devastated by this storm again had these sort of robust traditions of land ownership and political participation as well as a really overwhelming Black majority, especially in counties like Beaufort, that allowed them to try to wield recovery efforts as a way to rebuild their own communities and to try to bolster themselves against the approach of Jim Crow because there are many white South Carolinians who tried to use the hurricane’s destruction to deepen African American poverty, to subjugate African Americans to their larger political projects connected to Jim Crow, and to heighten economic exploitation in particular of Black sharecroppers or farm workers who relied on white landowners for a daily wage,” said Dr. Grego. So, in the aftermath of the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893, African Americans endeavored to “create a bulwark against Jim Crow” but were not exactly successful, and Dr. Grego emphasized that “it didn’t have to be this way.” 

Of course, the climate crisis is also central to this book, as the Lowcountry is experiencing the very real implications of climate change in the present with heavy rainfall forcing the region underwater. The 1893 hurricane had utterly devastating effects, with a death toll between 2,000 and 5,000 and many more deaths resulting from the sickness, poverty, and hunger that followed the storm. Dr. Grego explains how “the hurricane ends up being sort of this glass darkly that you can look at in 1893 and get a sense of what the Lowcountry may look like 100 years from now, of what those floods will do, of what land will be covered in water.”

The book is arranged in three parts. The first part establishes what life and the social, economic, and political contexts of the Lowcountry were like prior to the storm, explores the night the hurricane hit the coast, and “describes everybody seeing the world as it was as the night lifts and reveals the sort of devastation of the storm itself.” Part Two of Hurricane of the New South, approximately spanning from the end of August 1893 to July 1894, delves into the recovery efforts after the storm. It “encompassed both local efforts to provide relief and then arrival of the American Red Cross under the famous nurse, Clara Barton, where they were installed in the Lowcountry and worked there to deliver rations to help support African American efforts to bolster their autonomy.” Also, all of these disaster relief efforts were not carried out without backlash from white South Carolinians. Part Three covers the lasting economic, environmental, and political consequences of the hurricane in the Lowcountry from 1894 to the 1920s and how these impacts interfaced and left the Lowcountry “in the throes of Jim Crow.”

Dr. Grego joined the History Department at Queens as a Visiting Assistant Professor in August 2019 after completing her PhD in History at the University of Colorado-Boulder in May of 2019. Dr. Grego has taught a variety of courses at Queens on topics including race and gender in Southern history, the Civil Rights Movement, and the history of climate change.

Dr. Grego’s book has already been awarded  the 2021 Rachel Hines Prize, for best first book manuscript, from the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program at the College of Charleston. This award consists of a $1,000 prize–Dr. Grego will be donating over half of this amount to the Penn Center and Friends of Gadsden Creek–and a public lecture from the book to be delivered once coronavirus metrics decline in Charleston. 

by Emily Iknayan

Welcome back to the CAS Success Blog, for the fourth straight year! We’re happy to start this year in-person, face-to-face. To help keep our community safe and healthy as we’re in-person, Queens has required vaccinations or approved exemptions. We appreciate that. This year, we will continue to highlight the success stories of our CAS faculty working with our students. Join us.

For our first blog, we wanted to introduce our writers and let them tell you what they missed about not being in-person last year, and what they’re looking forward to this year, along with their selfies.

From April Markowski, Professional Writing and Rhetoric major, Class of 2022.

What I’m looking forward to my senior year: I’m ready to scoop up the opportunities that come my way! It’s the year to round out my college experience, and I’m stoked about taking classes that expand my mind. Next semester will be my capstone, and I really hope to hone in on my passion, combing what I’ve explored in rhetoric courses, and my care for elementary student literacy.

What I’ve missed about Queens: I’ve missed people watching. I’m back to sitting with my best friend outside the coffee house, and taking in the energy of those that pass. Sometimes we’ll see a friendly face, a new person to connect with, or a cool outfit to be inspired by. The campus feels alive again, and I am so grateful to be a part of it. I’m happy to do homework outside with those I love, and reconnect in-person, admiring the trees and nature that campus provides. 

What I’m grateful for: I’m grateful for my opportunity to study at Queens. I’ve made close connections with professors and friends, and it truly feels like a chosen family. The English department has become a second home, and I’m thankful for the opportunities that have risen from being a part of it, such as writing for this blog! I am grateful for the platform Queens has given me to explore my various passions in rhetoric and education.

From Emily Iknayan, a Double Major in History and Professional Writing and Rhetoric, with a minor in Philosophy, Class of 2022.

What I’m looking forward to in my senior year: I’m excited to be back in a physical classroom for my final year at Queens. I look forward to being back in the Writing Center and beginning my role as Lead Tutor. I’m elated that we’ll be able to do Room in the Inn on campus again in the winter and that I’ll be serving as the program’s coordinator this year. Further, I’m enthusiastic about finally checking off all of the boxes on my degree audit and getting to discuss history and rhetoric with my classmates and professors in the process. I’m curious to see how my senior year will shape where my life as a postgraduate will take me!!

What I’ve missed about Queens: I’ve missed the everyday discussions about history and rhetoric in the classroom, whether it was a few windows on RingCentral or a room in McEwen, where one can take in how the hundreds of years have perfumed the room. Additionally, I relished biking to school on the designated in-class hybrid days, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to allot time to bike through a few treacherous intersections to get to campus this year.

What I’m grateful for: I’m grateful that the vaccine is accessible to every student in the Charlotte area and beyond, and that the university has taken the initiative to have a vaccine requirement and continue requiring mask-wearing indoors to keep students, faculty, staff, and other community members safe. And I appreciate that I was able to have a somewhat restful summer that culminated in getting two Jack Russell Terrier puppies named Chowder and Clementine. 

From Izzy Harvey, Creative Writing Major, Class of 2022.

What I’m looking forward to my senior year: Finally, being in person! I’ve missed my friends and professors in the English department and around Queens. There’s no better way to kick off senior year than to be in class and having a good time.

What I’ve missed about Queens: Interacting with people outside of a little screen! While RingCentral was fun and accessible for a little while, seeing people in person and participating with everyone in the room is the golden standard. I also missed just running into people!

What I’m grateful for: I’m grateful for the professors and staff that have gone above and beyond for students during this time. I appreciate everyone at Queens, and I’m so happy to be back!