Elise Juska

Jun 11, 2024 | broadstreetreview.com | Elise Juska

It’s Monday, June 3, and I’m walking to my office on the eighth floor of Terra Hall. Over the years, my students have been amused by its smallness. To me, it’s always felt cozy. I like the window, which looks across Broad Street into the Bellevue. I like the one purple wall. This afternoon I unlock the door, as I have countless times, but can’t bring myself to go inside. I shouldn’t have been back on campus until August. The spring semester ended 17 days earlier.

May 29, 2024 | lithub.com | Elise Juska

The question of whether to attend a college reunion is often met with mixed emotions—nostalgia, curiosity, a healthy dose of apprehension. What will it feel like to go back to the campus of our youth? How will our lives compare to our classmates’? Which parts of our old selves might get dredged up? If a reunion is about reconnecting with the past, it also invites reflection on how things have changed. It’s a return to a time when we didn’t know yet where our lives would take us.

May 8, 2024 | flipboard.com | Elise Juska

Hijab 10 hours ago ASU scholar on leave after video of incident with woman in hijab posted online NBC News - NBCNews.com • 10h Jonathan Yudelman, a postdoctoral research scholar at Arizona State University, is on leave while the university investigates a video appearing to show him confronting a woman in a hijab at a pro-Israel rally outside campus.May 8, 2024 0:59 11 hours ago Dramatic video shows moment powerful tornado hits hotel USA TODAY • 11h A college student captured the moment when a...

May 8, 2024 | crimereads.com | Elise Juska

To step into a campus novel, like stepping onto a college campus, is to enter a miniature world. It’s a place with a particular geography, made of dorm rooms and classrooms, student centers and dining halls. Time is both fixed and in motion: for students, it’s always moving toward an endpoint, while for professors, time passes, but their students remain young. As a setting for fiction, the campus offers a natural structure and urgency: the arc of the semester, seasons of the academic year.

May 4, 2024 | entertainment-mag.com | Elise Juska

REUNION, by Elise JuskaAs the premise for a novel, a class reunion offers fertile literary ground. Characters consumed with memories of youth while reckoning with what they thought they’d become versus where they actually ended up are prime for development and growth. The complexities of spouses, children and careers (or lack thereof) accumulated since graduation are further sources of narrative conflict. Add a plot point or two, ramp up the tension and you have all the ingredients for drama.