Portland State Magazine Fall 2021

FALL 2021 // 35 Brett Bigham MS ’02 received an honorary doctoral degree in humane letters from Portland State this spring in recognition of distinguished public service. The 2014 Oregon Teacher of the Year known for his work in special education—including the creation of a nationally recognized Special Needs Prom—was fired after speaking up as an openly gay teacher for the rights of LGBTQ+ youth. His fight to retain his job with the Multnomah Education Service District went to the Supreme Court in the form of an amicus brief in the historic Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, ruling, which made it illegal to discriminate against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Bigham now works for Portland Public Schools. Watch his acceptance speech at tinyurl.com/r56yutp6 . Molly Gloss ’66 —an Oregon novelist whose works include Wild Life , The Jump-Off Creek and The Hearts of Horses , among others—was honored at the 2021 Oregon Book Awards with the C.E.S. Wood Distinguished Writer Award for her “enduring, substantial literary career.” From horse whisperers and homesteaders to newly discovered planets and an elusive Sasquatch or two, Gloss’ tales bend genres and break conventions. She has won an Oregon Book Award, two Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, a PEN West Fiction Prize, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and a Whiting Writers Award. Christine Meadows ’83 retired after 15 years as PSU’s director of opera and vocal area coordinator. Under her leadership, Portland State Opera flourished into an award-winning professional training program, with two full-scale productions per year performed for sell-out crowds. Meadows received the Maseeh Award for Outstanding Fine and Performing Arts Faculty in 2012 and was named the Vollum Professor of Voice in 2017. HIGHLIGHTS and part of the national conversation about police violence.” Jackson grew up seeing a side of Portland that’s often overlooked. But the city, he says, is more than lumberjack beards and naked bike rides. “That is part of Portland but it’s not all of Portland,” he says. “And though we are a really small part of the population here, I think the Black commu- nity at large has an outsized influence on the culture, for good or for bad.” He draws many parallels between his life and Arbery’s in his article. Both were high school athletes hoping to make it pro. Both lost their sports dreams and were trying to figure out where life was taking them. Both had run-ins with the law. Jackson, however, was able to make the transition from sports to academics because of an Underrepresented Minority Achieve- ment Scholarship he received to attend Portland State. “Luckily, I had an institution and I was a good enough student to stick in school,” Jackson says. “Who knows what would have happened if [Arbery] had an oppor- tunity like I did to stay in the university.” Jackson, who started dealing drugs as a student at Jefferson High School, was arrested and sentenced to 16 months in prison during his junior year in college. During that time, he sat down to write his life story, leaving with 60 pages on loose-leaf paper. “Without PSU holding my [scholarship], it’s safe to say I might be dead or back in prison,” he says. “That was a defining moment in my life.” Portland State provided a lifeline, both by protecting his scholarship and by offering him an example of another way to live. “To walk the Park Blocks and to see people, students, going in and out of Smith, going in and out of Neuberger,” he says. “To have that as a reprieve when there were some days that I was coming to school and I got robbed the night before. It was like a world that let me get away from the world that was really damaging me and the people that I knew.” After completing his degree, Jackson went on to participate in the early years of Portland State’s graduate writing program, where English faculty members Diana Abu-Jaber and Michael McGregor helped guide him to his life as a writer.Those 60 pages he wrote in prison resurfaced to be used in his graduate school application. “I’ll never forget, [Abu-Jaber] called me and said that I got in, and I hadn’t even finished the complete application yet,” Jackson says. “It was really serendipitous.” Abu-Jaber, who was his thesis advisor, saw Jackson’s promise immediately. “Right from the outset, Mitchell’s voice was all his own—brilliant, audacious, smashing rules in all the best ways,” she says. “His spirit leaps off the page. I was so excited when I read his work and just knew he was going to skyrocket.” Jackson went on to complete his master’s degree at PSU and a master’s in fine arts at New York University. He has since published two books, The Residue Years , a novel, and Survival Math: Notes from an All-American Family , a memoir, each receiving national recognition. A third is in the works. And it was Jackson’s time with PSU which started it all. “It was that phone call from Diana Abu-Jaber [that changed everything],” he says. “It was her opening the door to a new life.” —JENNIFER LADWIG MS ’21 From “Twelve Minutes and a Life” published by Runner’s World. Mitchell S. Jackson’s article won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for feature writing. Jackson, a Whiting Award recipient and past winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, currently lives in New York City. COURTESY OF CHRISTINE MEADOWS GRETCHEN CORBETT EDIS JURCYS Ahmaud Arbery, by all accounts, loved to run but didn’t call himself a runner. That is a shortcoming of the culture of running. That Maud’s jogging made him the target of hegemonic white forces is a certain failure of America. Check the books—slave passes, vagrancy laws, Harvard’s Skip Gates arrested outside his own crib—Blacks ain’t never owned the same freedom of movement as whites.