Favorite quote: “May the rest of our lives be the best of our lives.” –Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)
Memorable experiences in English: I’m graduating feeling very grateful for all the teachers and classmates I have met and worked with over the past four years. This spring, I’ve been in only one English class: Modern American Poetry with Professor Ferraro. The class is mostly seniors, and it has been such an engaging, challenging, exciting end to our time at Duke. There’s no one with whom I’d rather discuss Whitman’s twenty nine bathers! Thank you to all these classmates, and everyone else I have learned from at Duke, for everything.
Awards or honors during time at Duke: Graduation with Distinction in the Classical Studies Department
Plans/hopes for the future: My primary short-term goal is to finish re-reading the Harry Potter series. After that, it could be anything!
What it’s like to be an English major: This major and this department can be anything you want them to be. Take classes that sound interesting and new; get to know professors who inspire you; push yourself to read and study authors and topics that challenge and engage you. There is so many books to read, so much work to do. And what a wonderful place to do it.
Faculty Remarks:
Dear Gretchen,
What a luxury it seemed to me less than two months ago: an English major like you (and your co-conspirator Natasha) appears out of nowhere to help us read poetry for your final Duke semester. A fine ear and a clear, steady, knowing New England way: You caught “Home Burial” well, but you were not in the least alone in this, but your sense of the stakes for the bending of “Birches” was your special, an uncanny contribution to our Covid-coping. I am no Dickinson, but if I were I would pun shamelessly, if punchily, on your surname, given that Wright can indeed write with a forthrightness I seldom see in sophisticated ranks. Then again, our flunch with Natasha just before spring break had the unhurry of grown-up friendship-starting–for little did we know we would be looking back at the Commons, Commencement, as our not goodbye! –Tom Ferraro
