Alumnus David Bass (SM 1983, ScD) started his academic career as a music major at Yale before switching to chemistry and concluding with graduate degrees at MIT. He returned to music after a 20-year hiatus by writing A Space Opera, a work for family audiences inspired by the film Star Wars. A concert version was performed last weekend as part of Cambridge Arts Weekend. Soloists included Jake Yara (SB 1993) as Han Solo; Mr. Bass' wife Sue Hall (SB 1982, SM, PhD) was in the chorus.
Andrea Cohen, communications director for the MIT Sea Grant College Program, has recently published her first volume of poetry. The Cartographer's Vacation (Owl Creek Press), chosen from among 357 manuscripts for the 1999 Owl Creek Poetry Series, won the 11th annual Owl Creek Competition. "Slyly narrative, lyrical, street-smart and always fecund with detail, her poems -- whether singing, dreaming, or mourning -- reliably delight and instruct," wrote Steven Cramer, associate poetry editor of Atlantic Monthly. A recipient of a PEN Discovery Award for poetry, Ms. Cohen is the fiction coordinator for the Blacksmith House Reading Series. The book is available at the MIT Press Bookstore and at Grolier Bookstore in Harvard Square.
A version of this article appeared in the May 5, 1999 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 43, Number 29).
