Q&A

Turning Pain into Power: Meet Ernesto Javier Martínez

Growing up in a violent neighborhood, Ernesto Javier Martínez experienced the bullying that often robs queer Latinx youth of the ability to make sense of their lives. The award-winning author and filmmaker now uses storytelling to transform his own pain into healing for the students and communities he serves.

"Queer adults have not often had pleasant childhoods in homophobic societies," he says. "Writing stories that center queer youth presents an opportunity to look back on our own lives and heal."

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Page Turners

'Red Leviathan' Explores the History of Soviet Whaling

While conducting research on the Russian fur trade, Department of History Professor Ryan Tucker Jones kept encountering whales, both in literature and in real life. Upon learning that the Soviet Union had conducted a massive illegal whaling campaign in the 20th century, he knew he had something important to write about.   

His resulting book, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling, was shortlisted in June for the prestigious Pushkin House Book Prize and won the John Lyman Book Award from the North American Society for Oceanic History in 2022. 

“Because Soviet whale scientists had access to so many dead whales—more, really, than scientists anywhere else in the world—they were able to study the animals in exceptional detail,” Jones says. "Their observations led them to claim, very early on, that whales were actually exceptionally intelligent."

Read about Red Leviathan