JSC Morrison Lounge

Zinzi Clemmons is the Writer-in-Residence at Occidental College. She was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. Co-founder of the literary journal Apogee, she currently serves as associate editor at The Believer and as contributing editor to Literary Hub.

Wendy Cheng is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Scripps College. Her research focuses on race and ethnicity, comparative racialization, critical geography, urban and suburban studies, and diaspora. She is the author of The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (with Laura Pulido and Laura Barraclough; University of California Press, 2012).

D. J. Waldie has published seven non-fiction books, each dealing with different aspects of domestic life. Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir explored the intersection of personality and place. Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out, a collaboration with photographer Marissa Roth, observed downtown Los Angeles. Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles collected a decade of Waldie’s essays about the city’s rapid evolution. Close to Home: An American Album is a meditation on snapshot in the Getty Museum collection.

Becky M. Nicolaides specializes in the history of American cities, suburbs, and metro areas. She grew up in Los Angeles, attended the University of Southern California, then worked as a journalist before earning a PhD at Columbia University. Her books include My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles; The Suburb Reader, co-edited with Andrew Wiese; and a current project on the history of suburban social and civic life in Los Angeles since 1945.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. He was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. Joudah is the author of Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (Milkweed Editions, 2018), Alight (Copper Canyon, 2013), Textu (Copper Canyon, 2014), and The Earth in the Attic (2008), which was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.

Senior comps presenters:

• Shasta Clokey
• Max Marion
• Ellen Shin

About Robert Chen

Robert Chen is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Occidental College. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA. He also holds an M.S. in Computer Science from UCSD.