What Are You Going To Do With That? The Arts and Humanities at Work

If you’re a student of the arts or humanities and a well-meaning relative has ever asked “what are you going to do with that?” this event is for you. Five panelists working in educational nonprofits, arts advocacy organizations, archives, and bookstores will speak to what it’s like to build a career outside the university that still privileges the ideas and values of the liberal arts. 

Discussion will begin at 4:30. Join us before the panel at 3:30 for a networking reception with our panelists. 

Rachel Cass has worked at Harvard Book Store since 2006. Over the years, she has worked as a bookseller, shift supervisor, events staff, marketing coordinator, and marketing/events manager, before becoming head buyer in the summer of 2013.

Rose Gorman is a writer and Program Director at NY Writers Coalition, a community-based writing and social justice organization in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has appeared in The Bridge, Paste Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2012 she was recognized as one of 30 Women Making a Difference by re:gender and was a member of the organization’s first American Express Fellows cohort. Over the past 10 years, Rose has facilitated numerous writing groups for youth and adults, including veterans, recent immigrants, LGBT homeless youth and elders, and self-care focused workshops for people of color. She also serves as a Fiction Reader for Apogee Journal, an art and literary publication that engages with identity politics, such as race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and intersectional identities. 

Daniel Johnson is the author of How to Catch a Falling Knife, published by Alice James Books. Currently, he is working on his second collection titled In the Absence of Sparrows, which explores his nearly twenty-year friendship with American journalist James Foley, who was killed by ISIS in Syria in 2014. Johnson’s poetry has been featured on National Public Radio, PBS News Hour, The Washington Post and in a variety of journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry,The Iowa Review, and I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio. From 2007 to 2016, he served as the founding executive director of 826 Boston, a youth writing center in Roxbury’s Egleston Square, which is part of the national network founded by writer Dave Eggers and educator Ninive Calegari.

Sarah Ponichtera is the Project Manager of the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Collections Initiative, a mass digitization project that aims to digitally reunite YIVO’s pre-war holdings held between New York and Lithuania. She earned her PhD from Columbia University in Yiddish Literature and Language in 2012, where she wrote about multilingual modernism in American Yiddish poetry. She is also working on Translating Aaron Zeitlin’s Brenendike Erd, the first Yiddish spy novel, for which she won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2014. 

Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast, forthcoming from Ecco in fall 2017, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation.