Globe Magazine to Feature Stories By, About Emerson Writers

The May 10, 2020 issue of The Boston Globe Magazine will feature the writing of three current and recently graduated Emersonians, on subjects ranging from a new mother’s “fourth trimester” to Gen Z’s reaction to COVID-19, to a poet’s newly discovered work.

The students were all part of the course Writing for The Boston Globe Magazine, taught by Writing, Literature and Publishing Assistant Professor Susanne Althoff. Althoff was the editor of the Globe‘s Sunday magazine before she began teaching at Emerson in 2015.

In her cover story for the May 10 issue, MFA creative nonfiction writing student Nicole Graev Lipson wrote about the first three months after a child is born, known as the “fourth trimester.” Calling this period “a disorienting time of physical and emotional change for women.” Lipson explained how women frequently have to tackle resulting mental health conditions and physical ailments on their own — using the stories of women in Greater Boston and her own experiences as a mother — and how the coronavirus outbreak is exacerbating this situation.

Lipson took Althoff’s Boston Globe course in the spring of 2019 and has been regularly writing for the Globe Magazine since then on the topics of motherhood, parenting, and gender.

Cordelia Miller, who is graduating from Emerson this month with her MA in Publishing and Writing, was enrolled in Althoff’s Boston Globe course in the spring of 2020. Her piece in the May 10 issue is about the late poet Scott Harney, whose first book is being posthumously published this month.

Most of the poems in the book were discovered after Harney’s death by his long-time partner, Emerson College Professor Megan Marshall. Marshall teaches nonfiction writing and archival research at Emerson, and is a celebrated writer; her second biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 2014.  

Monica Petrucci ’20, who is graduating from Emerson this month with her BA in Writing, Literature & Publishing, was also enrolled in Althoff’s Boston Globe course this spring. For the magazine’s issue this Sunday, Petrucci penned an opinion essay on the current challenges for Generation Z, writing, “The coronavirus impact is just the latest layer of childhood trauma for a generation that has already been through a lot.”

“Each of these three articles is quite different,” Althoff said, “but together they show the sophisticated writing and reporting that our students produce. They are stories full of sensitivity and emotion and built on deep research.”