Andrew Zieffler

Conrad Kent Rivers (1933–1968) was a renowned black poet who won the Savannah State Poetry Prize for his poem Poor Peon while he was still in high school. His poem Four Sheets to the Wind And a One-Way Ticket to France was published in his posthumous collection of poetry written about or dedicated to Richard Wright, The Wright Poems (1972). Conrad Kent River’s The Wright Poems. Issued as Volume Eighteen in Paul Breman’s “Heritage Series” of African-American poetry chapbooks.

In the great pandemic of 2020 many of us are working from home. Since 40+ students now see me in my home, I thought I would write a post about the room that they often see me in. So in that spirit, welcome to my home office. LEFT: Where the “magic” happens. Seated on the couch are two of my three newly minted teaching assistants. RIGHT: Another view of the office.

In 2019, I read a book called Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture. Aside from being incredibly entertaining and interesting, there was a passage that struck a chord with me that related to academic publishing. In this passage, James Billington, Librarian of Congress from 1987–2015, was lamenting the degradation of the book through the “hyperspecialization and bureaucratization” found in the academic monograph.

Our department has an annual Graduate Student Research Day (GSRD) in which students present their research for the rest of the department. Although there are five speakers, one from each program in the department, the majority of students participate in a poster session. This year my student Chelsey Legacy put together a poster to present some of the data we collected from a fall administration of the Statistics Teaching Inventory.

I am spring cleaning my computer and have a couple PNG files of plots I made that I want to adios. So, I thought to myself, “self…why don’t you put these on a blog post before you trash them forever.” It sounded like a good idea at the time, so here they are. This second plot is a sunburst plot I created for the data visualization course. If I remember right, this was created using my annual TV watching data from 2017 and made using RawGraphs.