Class Notes: 2003
Lisa Quiroga graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in English in 2003. Fifteen years later, her life turned upside down when her father died in a car accident in summer 2018. While sorting his belongings, she found two old shoeboxes full of handwritten letters. Not knowing what they were, she took them all home in a plastic tote and promptly forgot about them.
During the Covid outbreak, Lisa finally read through the letters. They turned out to be her dad’s letters written home during the Vietnam war! Lisa was overwhelmed with grief and gratitude at finding this last connection to him.
Lisa decided to self-published an anthology of her father’s letters on Amazon, available via this link: http://a.co/d/aSwnY5T. Her book recounts a year in the life of a 19 year old enlisted soldier from Santa Rosa, California, embedded in the Vietnam war between 1971–1972. Please check out her book and reach out with feedback at lquiroga.author@gmail.com.
Dr. Colin D. Dewey (BA English ’03; PhD Cornell ’11) will begin a year-long sabbatical in 2023 following promotion to Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Culture and Communication at CSU Maritime Academy in Vallejo, CA. His work on maritime culture in the long eighteenth century combines traditional academic research with his three decades as a merchant seafarer before coming to Cal as a non-traditional transfer student in 2002. Dr. Dewey joined the faculty in 2013 and has previously been honored by Cal Maritime’s Outstanding Teaching Award and awards for Exemplary Service.
