Ink & Tracks
New creative offerings from Connecticut College alumni.
Borderless
By Jennifer De Leon ’01
Caught in the crosshairs of gang violence, a teen girl and her mother set off on a perilous journey from Guatemala City to the U.S. border in this heart-wrenching young adult novel from the author of Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From. At 17 years old, Maya’s talent for making clothing out of unusual objects has landed her at Guatemala City’s most prestigious art school. Her Mamá is her biggest supporter, so when she doesn’t come to the school’s fashion show, Maya doesn’t know what to think. But the truth is worse than she could have imagined—the gang threats in their neighborhood have walked in their front door. After barely making their escape, Maya and her mom have no choice but to continue their desperate flight all the way through Guatemala and Mexico in hopes of crossing the U.S. border.
RESPITE
by Wall to Wall, Egil Dennerline ’97 and Palle Hjorth
In addition to a pandemic, economic insecurity, Brexit, polarization, climate change and new major global wars, Egil Dennerline ’97, one half of the musical duo Wall to Wall, has had to fight for his life after being diagnosed with multiple cancers and receiving a bone marrow transplant. After he was given a 50% chance of survival, Dennerline was inspired to create his fifth studio album, appropriately named RESPITE, “or a well-deserved break from difficult times.” Released on Sept. 23, 2022, the new album features the track “Tidens Låse (The Locks We Share),” composed in collaboration with one of Denmark’s most popular singer-songwriters, Peter Sommer.
The Nature of Endangerment in India: Tigers, ‘Tribes’, Extermination & Conservation, 1818-2020
By Ezra Rashkow ’03, associate professor of history at Montclair State University
Combining years of fieldwork and archival research with intensive theoretical interrogations, this book offers a global intellectual history of efforts to “protect” indigenous peoples and their cultures, usually from above. It also offers a critique of the activist impulse to cry “Save the tigers!” and “Save the tribes!” together in the same breath. It is not a history or an ethnography of the tribes of India but rather a history of discourses about what is perceived to be the fundamental question for nearly all indigenous peoples in the modern world: the question of survival.
Folly Cove Sketches: Remembering Virginia Lee Burton
By June Vail ’65, professor emerita of theater and dance at Bowdoin College
Virginia Lee Burton wrote and illustrated the beloved children’s books Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and Caldecott-winning Little House, and founded the renowned Folly Cove Designers, a nationally recognized design collective. This generously illustrated memoir offers insights into the wide-ranging artistic projects and everyday life of the woman behind the books and designs. June Vail’s unique narrative recounts how spending weekends and vacations with Burton, her great-aunt, during her four years at Conn deeply influenced her and gave her new perspectives on living and making art.
Silk Road Centurion
By Scott Forbes Crawford ’00
In 53 B.C., Roman soldier Manius Titinius falls captive to a warband of Xiongnu, nomadic horsemen who rule the seas of grass between the Gobi Desert and Mountains of Heaven. His forced march to the East plunges him into a new world of wonder and peril. Manius has only his fighting spirit and faith in Fortuna, goddess of luck, to aid him in a faraway land: China. From windswept valleys to bustling cultural crossroads and daring rescue missions to the daily struggle for survival on the borderlands, Silk Road Centurion is a thrilling historical epic of endurance and faith at the edge of empires.