“I was Joanne Sabarese as a graduate student,” writes Joanne M. Greenway. She adds, “I received my master’s degree in French Lit. in 1971 and, following grad school, I worked a wholly unintentional, but rewarding, 30 years as a social worker for the Hamilton County (Ohio) Department of Human Services. I developed a renewed interest in poetry and have had two chapbooks published since 2016, Limited Engagement and True Confessions. I will have a third released in August of this year from Finishing Line Press, entitled Low-hanging Fruit.” Greenaway lives in Cincinnati.
“I am a global health guy, which basically means that you go off to some distant place on the planet and try to make the people healthier, or at least try to prevent them from dying of something really horrible,” writes Carl W. Henn III (BA French, 1981) of Indianapolis. He adds, “In my case, I worked on HIV/AIDS in Africa for the last 20 years, in addition to working earlier on disaster relief. I started out in the Peace Corps in the 1980s and then went all around Africa, eventually working in 29 of the 54 nations. I finally came back from Africa just before the pandemic, then broke my wrist in a cycling accident. So, I wrote a book about Africa, titled, My Two Centuries in Africa. The book is a humorous, affectionate, unconventional book about Africa, part travel book and part memoir.” In it, Henn strives to “set the record straight on Africa. It is not all war, poverty, and disease. It is not just a game park for wealthy foreigners to go on safari and see all the wild animals.”
Christopher J. Momenee (MA French, 1990) wrote the romantic comedy Senior Moment, starring William Shatner, Jean Smart, and Christopher Lloyd, which premiered in theaters on March 26, 2021. Shatner plays a retired Top Gun Navy pilot who, stripped of his driver’s license after a street race, must learn to navigate life and love without his beloved vintage Porsche. Momenee is a writer and editor who lives in New York City.
“It definitely feels like it’s another lifetime ago that I walked into my first cultural anthropology class at IU,” writes Stephanie N. White (BA Anthropology & French, 1995). She adds, “I was hooked and love the field even to this day. I’ve had a twisting career and personal path which led me to jobs in the diagnostics and pharma sectors, to teaching English as a foreign language, volunteering, blog writing, and finally moving abroad to Switzerland where I’ve lived for 23 years. Throughout my career I held positions in sales/key account management, business development, global marketing, corporate partnering all within the healthcare field. Then, I left to do a master’s degree at Bocconi in Milan in international healthcare management and economic policy.” White continues, “All the while, I got married, had a child, became a dog mom, and even managed it all with a debilitating and progressive chronic illness since the age of 19. My current career choice took me into social impact and the luxury fashion industry, working for a unique changemaker brand which empowers female refugee artists to lift them up out of poverty through their own talent and hard work. SEP [the type of firm White is working for, ed.] stands for Social Enterprise Project and has been like a dream come true.”
In December, Amanda J. Sarasien (BA French & Spanish, 2005) completed a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her in-progress translation of the Brazilian novel Springtime in the Bones, by Állex Leilla, was among 24 projects awarded an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship. She is now pursuing the translation’s publication. She is also in the final stages of writing a book of her own, a memoir/essay looking at illness and disability through the lens of literary translation. She explains that the themes of the two books intersect. “The main character of Springtime in the Bones grapples again and again with words, trying to understand the pain, give it a grammar. And yet, she always comes up short,” she says. “Both the novel and the memoir use experimentation to confront those challenges – each piece informed the other.”
Sarasien, of Chicago, is a writer and literary translator working from French and Portuguese, her respective major and minor at IU. She recently completed a two-year tenure as co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee. Learn more about Sarasien’s work at amandasarasien.com.
Chantal Fink Mehill (BA, Criminal Justice, English & French, 2010) was promoted from attorney to officer in the St. Louis office of Midwest law firm Greensfelder in February 2022. She handles a wide range of construction matters, including contract negotiations, early dispute resolution, arbitration, and litigation and has represented owners, general contractors, subcontractors, and designers on a regional and national level. She also has represented businesses in contractual, lending, employment, and real estate matters. This marks the second time in two years that Greensfelder has promoted an all-female class of attorneys to officer, fitting with the firm’s core value of promoting equity and removing barriers to success. Mehill lives in St. Louis.
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