literature, community, education, social justice
About Us
“Transforming silence into language and action” — Audre Lorde
Carolyn Gleim Madden
My name is Carolyn Gleim Madden, born in Brooklyn, NY. I grew up in Ridgewood, Queens and went to Public School 71 that counts among their graduates Mae West and James Cagney. I eventually made my way to completing an undergraduate degree at Queens College in linguistics. I finished my graduate work in my late 30s and taught and researched second language acquisition, bilingualism and ESL methodology.
Before moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to teach at the English Language Institute (ELI), I taught in Mexico and then my husband and I lived and taught in the Açores with our sons, David and Marcus. After returning, we continued living in New York until 1980 when I began a long and satisfying career as Lecturer and Associate Director for Curriculum at the ELI at the University of Michigan.
I reveled in teaching and researching communicative methodologies that focused on interaction as both the means and the goal of language learning. One of the reasons I eventually majored in Linguistics was because I was enthralled with the idea of historical linguistics and the relationship of languages to each other. We share the ability to learn language and to express our thoughts, hopes and dreams universally.
In my late 50s I started law school at Wayne State Law School, Detroit, Michigan, to follow my dream of becoming a lawyer. I fulfilled the dream and have used the degree to support my efforts in criminal legal reform. As co-chair and facilitator of Friends of Restorative Justice of Washtenaw County, I have participated in county and nation-wide efforts to bring restorative justice as an alternative to a retributive system that seeks only punishment; the end goal is to bring healing to communities and to end mass incarceration.
Throughout my formal studies and professional life, I have continued to experience literature as a source of enrichment, as a guide to find answers to the questions of life’s meaning, and as a way to find common ground with the universe and all that lives within the universe. Among my early favorites are Charles Dickens, Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities; and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brönte and I am equally moved by some of the modern classics as we journey through first novels, international novels, nature, love, friendship and the struggles of our times.
New York remains my home town. (Photo credit: Marcus E. Madden)
Ann-Marie Nazzaro
I was born in Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital in Jersey City—after, and because of, World War II. I learned of wars, hunger, plague, things nuclear from my Sister-teachers of the 1950’s (some delighting in the telling). This far in, I see how life is: What comes, serendipity, what you say yes to or answer no.
I’m the child of working-class parents. My mother crossed the Atlantic from the south of France, wedded to her GI. Neither parent graduated high school, but Marie’s intense belief in Education sent all three of us to college and beyond.
My undergraduate studies were in English and French, as one of 100 women at the previously all-male Saint Peter’s College. After teaching for four years, good friends, Marianne and her husband, invited us to Ann Arbor where I did my Master’s (Radio-TV-Film/Gerontology-Health) and my path started shifting. Returning east, I did my “terminal” degree at Penn. My dream: To work internationally doing health communications research/public health education, promoting, sustaining breastfeeding and teaching about infant rehydration in emerging countries.
Early at University of Pennsylvania, I became pregnant and a year later had a bigger surprise: Our son, through a spontaneous mutation, sans family history, has hemophilia. Our daughter arrived 3 years later and by 5 wished for hemophilia so she could get the attention we gave our son. My plan, for after the PhD, changed: I would work in the US in family, senior and women’s health. I did this with YWCA until a New York Times ad lured me to lead Education for the National Hemophilia Foundation (NHF).
After more than a decade with NHF, three women physicians (hematologists and Ob/Gyn) invited me to help found a national organization to teach physicians that women and girls do indeed have blood disorders and, when they do, their role in reproduction and monthly periods bring unique, dire bleeding consequences. For almost a decade, I worked to help establish the Foundation for Women & Girls with Blood Disorders, which still educates providers and changes women’s lives. My volunteer activities are in politics and Public Health/Public Safety—working to change how urban communities stay safe and healthy.
My love of language deepened in high school—debate, oratory, books and plays. This passion continues in discussions with our Cloverhill Literary Society and now in sharing our selections through this Website. From our readings so far, I’ve set 3 aims: spend time with Richard Powers; learn Polish to sit with Olga Tokarczuk, and do something wildly purposeful with this “one…precious life.” (Photo credit: wjm)
Erica Gail Polakoff (aka ricky)
Erica Gail Polakoff has a B.S. in Ecology, an M.S. in Education, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University. She is co-editor of Gender and Globalization: Patterns of Women’s Resistance (deSitter Publications, 2011), and author of a number of articles and photoessays on Latin American political economy.
My given name is Erica but my family has always called me ricky. We were a working-class family living in a working-class Manhattan neighborhood, on the 4th floor of a 6-story apartment building that was across the street from the 207th street elevated stop on the 7th avenue (IRT) line. My dad’s parents immigrated to NYC with their families as teenagers, from a town in the Ukraine known as Chernigova. Every summer they rented a bungalow for us in the Rockaways, a few blocks from the beach. Perhaps it is no surprise that I have always had a deep regard for the ocean and often feel more at home in the water than on land.
I am an ecologist first by education and training, graduating from Cornell University after attending classes and conducting research in the Mediterranean and at the University of Michigan Biological Station. However, in the late 1970s, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras, which radically changed my outlook, perceptions and fields of study. I returned to graduate school at Cornell, majoring in sociology and anthropology with specializations in Latin American studies, political economy, community education, and women’s studies. In 1982, I taught the first Women’s Studies course (“Women and Development in the Third World”) in the Sociology Department at Cornell, and discovered that I loved teaching.
In 1983, I received a Fulbright Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant to conduct research in the Cochabamba valley in Bolivia where I also worked as a photographer, documenting the lives of extraordinary individuals amid the social, political and economic chaos of the times.
For the next 35 years, I was a professor at several institutions of higher education, where I taught courses on race, class and gender in the US and Latin America, on visual sociology and on international film, while continuing research in Latin America.
Over the years, I have been active in Latin American struggles for human rights, democracy and justice, and, in the U.S., in anti-nuclear protests, feminist causes and anti-racism education.
As a photographer and a naturalist for all of my adult life, I have been fascinated by the unique and varied forms that life takes—especially shapes, colors, adaptations to the environment and means of inter-species communication.
Also, I have always been passionate about libraries and the power of books to transport us to unknown places, introduce us to unfamiliar landscapes and cultures, and imbue us with other consciousnesses and realities. I especially enjoy reading multiple works by the same author, enthralled by the often different universes they invite me to inhabit.
A few of my all-time favorite novels include: Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game (Hesse), Deep Rivers (Arguedas), Surfacing (Atwood), The Island Beneath the Sea (Allende), Ceremony (Silko), The Hundred Secret Senses (Tan), Flight Behavior & Demon Copperhead (Kingsolver), LaRose (Erdrich), Beloved (Morrison), Desert (Le Clezio), Milkman (Burns), Where the Crawdads Sing (Owens), Apeirogon (McCann), Jack (Robinson), Hamnet (O’Farrell), Deacon King Kong & The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (McBride), Wandering Stars (Orange), Playground (Powers), There Are Rivers in the Sky (Shafak), This is Happiness (Williams).
(Photo credit: Keith Foley)
For more about me and to view my portfolio, visit my photo website: www.ericagailpolakoffphoto.net
Marianne Elizabeth Zubryckyj (née Barrett)
I was born in Jersey City, NJ, in 1948. One of my fondest early memories is walking to the public library on Claremont Avenue and bringing home an armful of books that would transport me. My greatest fear was that I would eventually read all the children’s books available there. Thankfully, the world of books proved more bountiful than I’d ever imagined back then.
I am the oldest of nine children and attended Catholic schools through college. In high school I showed a talent for math and science and was encouraged to pursue that direction, but after a brief stint as a chemistry major, I switched my focus to literature, my first love. I received my BA in English from St. Peter’s College in 1970.
My graduate studies at the University of Michigan were interrupted for two years when my husband and I decided to live in Germany. We serendipitously landed in a small village outside Munich, and I delved into learning the language by attending classes at a language institute while working for German companies.
Back in Ann Arbor, I completed my MA in English in 1974, my MA in German in 1976, and my high school teaching certificate in 1977. I immediately began my teaching career at Dexter High School, where I established the World Languages Department and served for many years as its chair. I spent the 1984-85 school year as a Fulbright Exchange Teacher in Essen, Germany. During my thirty-four-year career I taught all levels of English and German.
For decades I stuck mostly to reading and re-reading the classics -- novels by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Mann, Dickens, Eliot, Conrad, Faulkner, to name a few. Gradually I widened my reading to contemporary authors, relying on suggestions from friends. I now feel like my young self again, transported by writers like Marilynn Robinson, Colum McCann, Olga Tokarczuk, Louise Erdrich, Isabel Wilkerson, Jane Hirshfield, Joy Harjo, Ada Limón. But I’m no longer worried about running out of reading material!
As for other interests -- I enjoy reading about cosmology, astrophysics and quantum physics. I recently surprised myself by starting to write poetry. I help take care of my four grandchildren, practice yoga daily, and in the summer tend my vegetable garden. I am a member of Michigan Resistance, a group that addresses state legislative issues. Last, but not least, I belong to a women’s spiritual circle that has met monthly since 1996. (Photo credit: Anonymous)
Web design and administration by ericagailpolakoff. Unless otherwise noted, all images are original photographs ©2022 by ericagailpolakoff.
For polakoff’s photo website see: ericagailpolakoffphoto.net