what happens when you open your heart to students: in this issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette

Last evening, a long and beautiful conversation over dinner with dear friends; the gift of a hummingbird's nest; the blue-green globe of a harvested watermelon. Through the night, work on a single Florence scene (woodpeckers with green heads; uncertain love). Then, this morning, the discovery that an essay I had written for The Pennsylvania Gazette—a magazine more handsome (in my humble opinion) than The New Yorker (and you know how I love The New Yorker) and just as smart—is live. This is the story I wrote about the students I love, and it begins in New Orleans, with my Katie, who met me there one morning for beignets.

The opening paragraphs are here, below. The story can be read in its entirety, here. And can I just say how much I love the illustration, which was built from a photograph that I had sent? Someone has tamed my hair and given me some charm. No one will ever quite capture the beauty of Katie.

John Prendergast and Trey Popp, thank you for saying yes—for letting me tell this story to Penn parents, Penn alum, my own students. Thank you, too, for putting so many of my students in your pages through the years. Those interested in reading some of those student essays should click here and here. And also here. You'll be wowed. I still am.

By Beth Kephart | It had to be beignets. It had to be early on a steamy day beneath the green-and-white striped awnings of Café Du Monde, on the edge of the French Quarter.

“Meet you there,” Katie said. I said.

You buy the beignets three at a time. You dig for them beneath considerable dustings of soft-as-silk white sugar. You look up and across the table, and there she is—your former student, laughing at your incompetence with doughnuts.

This is the way an adjunct teacher’s family grows: one student at a time. One story you can’t shake. One question asked, one something confided, one breakthrough sentence, one email sent at midnight, one handwritten thank-you note for a recommendation gladly offered, one warm plate of a Creole specialty.

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Philadelphia's Literary Legacy: now up at the Philadelphia International Airport

My dear friend Mike Cola—former president at Shire, bird lover, nest finder, renaissance kind of guy—wrote yesterday to say that, upon passing through the Philadelphia International Airport, he had found my book looking back at him.

I could not be more stunned, nor more grateful, to be one of the fifty authors included. I look forward to the official unveiling next Tuesday morning with my city's mayor, the head of the Free Library, and others. I think I'll have to get my hair done.

The official release:

Philadelphia’s Literary Legacy:

Selected Authors, Playwrights, and Poets –

From Writers of the Declaration of Independence to Present Day

In Partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia

Terminal A-East, ticketed passengers

Since the writing of the nation's Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Philadelphia has been home to many celebrated authors. This exhibition is a visual overview of Philadelphia's rich literary past and present. Given the theme, librarians from the Free Library of Philadelphia were invited to select 50 authors, playwrights, and poets from various eras and genres that represent the breadth of the region’s literary creativity. 

The Philadelphia area is proud to have nurtured literary excellence since the birth of the nation with authors like Charles Brockden Brown, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine to 19^th century writers such as Louisa May Alcott, W.E.B. DuBois, George Lippard, and Owen Wister. The Philadelphia region has continued to foster modern authors including Lloyd Alexander, Pearl S. Buck, Margaret Mead, and James Michener  to today’s contemporary authors, playwrights, poets, and children’s book illustrators including the world renowned Berenstain’s, Sandra Boynton, Lorene Cary, Noam Chomsky, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Solomon Jones, Ken Kalfus, Sonia Sanchez, Lisa Scottoline, Jennifer Weiner, and David Wiesner.

All of the authors represented in the exhibition are award-winning, best-selling writers. Collectively, their literary achievements include the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pulitzer Prizes for Literature, Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, Caldecott Medals for the year’s most distinguished American picture book for children, and Newbery Medals for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.

From romance novels, historical novels, urban fiction, and journalism to science fiction, Gothic fiction, young adult fiction, children’s book illustration, comics, and books about linguistics, civil rights, and anthropology -- these 50 authors exemplify Philadelphia’s diverse literary legacy and continued contributions to the regional, national, and international literary culture.

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Dine In/Help Out

Last year, I had the privilege of hosting two of my long-time clients—Mike Cola, until recently the president of Shire Pharmaceuticals, and Jerry Sweeney, the CEO of Brandywine Realty Trust, along with the beautiful women in their lives, for an initiative called Dine In/Help Out.  Dine In/Help Out is designed to promote healthy eating through its Farm to Families program.  I chronicled my efforts here, on the blog.  Confessed to being a less-than-perfect cook who is blessed with near-perfect friends.

This summer St. Christopher's Foundation for Children is sponsoring its second DIHO event, and because I adore Jan Shaeffer, the Foundation's executive director, and because the St. Christopher's Foundation crowd is my all-time most favorite philanthropic Philly crowd, I was there, at the launch party.  Read about the whole story here, in this Joan A. Bang Mainline Media News.  Or go to the Dine In/Help Out site and see what you can do to have fun and help this worthy cause.

Thank you, Kimberly Hallman of Devine + Powers, for sending this to me just now.

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celebrating Mike Cola, Shire President, as he steps toward a new future

I don't often bring my business life onto this literary blog, but today has to be different.  Today I wish to honor Mike Cola, with whom I have had the pleasure of working at various corporations for the past two decades. Since 2005, Mike has been at Shire, a company that has grown from one primarily dependent on a single product to one now serving patients all over the world with a wide range of central nervous system, gastrointestinal, and renal treatments—and a company (most importantly) with a burgeoning Specialty development pipeline, thanks in large part to Mike's innovative, questing, and (quite frankly) brilliant mind.  Thanks, too, to the team Mike built.

When Shire announced Mike's resignation as president of the Specialty Pharma business yesterday, I thought back on the many conversations I have been privileged to have with this man.  We had a formal excuse—the internal Shire publication that I write—and we would (with the guidance and impetus provided by Charlene McGrady) get the job done.

But when there was time to spare, there would be so much more—conversations about history (personal and global); conversations about science; conversations about the kids Mike would meet along the way in his capacity as basketball coach and quiet giver; conversations about the beach and birds; conversations about the wife and children he deeply cherishes; conversations about chickens, eggs, the resurrection of barns; conversations about books; conversations about his dad.  I have consulted since I was twenty-five years old.  I have met some special people.  Mike Cola will always be, to me, one of those very special people.  He cares about big things.  He is prophetic.  He changes companies and lives in ways both sweeping and small.  He looks out across his desk and asks you how you're doing.  He remembers (his memory is startling) every last thing you ever told him.  He asks how your family is. He asks about the kids you teach and the books you want to write.  He comes to your birthday party and he arrives at your house when (almost paralyzed by anxiety) you have invited him for a Dine In/Help Out meal.

Mike Cola is one of the great minds out there—a scientist, a leader, a deep reader and complex thinker, a farmer, a philanthropist, a father, a husband.  He could be intimidating, if he wanted to be, but he's too interested in learning and doing more to crowd another out.

I will miss Mike greatly as I continue my travels throughout Shire.  But most of all, I wish him happiness—more time with his beautiful wife and kids, with those eggs in that barn, with the birds along the shore, and with whatever great thing he will do next.

Things change. The world opens itself newly.

   

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In Memory

Perhaps the best thing about the corporate work I do is the people it allows me to meet—the visionaries who take risks and build companies, the researchers who discover new cures, the developers who have ideas about the renaissance of West Philadelphia, the leaders of not-for-profit organizations who seek out ways to change the lives of the kids of North Philly.

For the past nearly twenty years, I've had the privilege of knowing Mike Cola, now the president of a pharmaceutical company, but mostly, to me, a well-read, inventive, and so brilliant man who has always placed people and family first.  Mike wouldn't want me talking about all he does, almost invisibly, for so many.  But perhaps, today, he won't mind if I commit this post to the memory of his father, Rudolph Alexander Cola, who passed away on Friday and whose life will be celebrated later today.

The obituary lists just some of Mr. Cola's achievements.  He was a man who, in his lifetime, signed a professional baseball contract with the Philadelphia Athletics, became a decorated veteran during World War II, won new air pollution control regulations as a member of the Philadelphia Air Pollution Control Board, coached both baseball and basketball teams, and, as a physicist, developed 23 working patents responsible for such things as cathode ray tubes and flat-panel plasma displays.  He was also a man famous in my own neighborhood for spending nine years developing educational software applications for a young man who'd suffered an early brain injury—developing that software and sitting there, with that young man, making certain that he learned.  So much of who Mike is reflects, I suspect, so much of who his dad always was, and I don't think I've ever sat with Mike, in all these years, when Rudy Cola did not in some way factor into whatever it was we were talking about.

So that today my heart is heavy for Mike, heavy for his whole family.  But I am also grateful for the many ways that this father lives on in his son.

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