In recent years, the Multicultural Resource Center (MRC) has helped to support alumni speakers on campus. This has included bringing back alumni for MRC sponsored programming as well as providing funds to help support events sponsored by other offices. Here are some recent examples and their bios:

Myrl Beam, OC '05 was a Comparative American Studies (CAS) major and a Gender and Women’s Studies minor. During his time at Oberlin, Myrl was a CAS Major Representative and was awarded the Cemelli Grant to support work in queer studies, the Leah Freed Memorial Prize, and the Comfort Starr Prize in CAS. He was a facilitator for private readings around white privilege and antiracism as well as an active member of the Community Coalition for the Prevention of Sexualized Violence, LGBT Union and was a board member of the Edmonia Lewis Center for Women and Transgender People. He was instrumental in the development of the MRC’s Trans 101 Training. Myrl is currently working in Chicago as the LGBT Court Advocate for LGBT identified survivors of sexualized violence on behalf of Hull House Domestic Violence Court Advocacy Project.

Alison Bechdel, OC’81 is the author of the critically acclaimed Fun Home (called "one of the very best graphic novels ever" in Booklist) and of the syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Her presentation addressed the historical/sexual/cultural shifts that have occurred since she first started drawing Dykes To Watch Out For in the early eighties, including a discussion of racial difference, liberation, and assimilation. The second part of the talk switched from her comic strip to a reading from her new book Fun Home, a graphic memoir about
growing up with her closeted gay father, which unlike her previous books, was published by a large mainstream publisher and has been reviewed widely. She concluded with a discussion of changes in both the sexual landscape as well as the publishing landscape in the past twenty-five years.

Ilana Cerna-Turoff, OC '04 majored in Latin American Studies. They received numerous academic recognitions such as the Cemelli Research Grant to support queer studies and the Class of 1968 Nonprofit Leadership Internship Stipend. Ilana was also a John Frederick Oberlin Scholar. Ilana was very committed as an activist in Zami and the American Indian Council. They helped to organize the Indigenous Women’s Series as well as wrote for student of color publications like In Solidarity. Since graduating, Ilana has worked in New York City for a number of organizations: as an instructor of political organizing for Gear Up; as a coordinator of youth leadership for ASPIRA—an organization focused on Latino/a youth; and until recently was part of the public education team for the Sylvia Rivera Law Project—where their work focused on the trans and gender non-conforming community.

Dulani, OC '04 was an independent major in Art as a Form of Activism. She is a founding board member of the Edmonia Lewis Center for Women and Transgender People. She was also active in the Sexual Assault Support Team and was part of Lyricistas—a women of color spoken word performance group. Most recently, Dulani was the Development Director of Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), a South Asian non-profit organization in New York City. From February until April of this year, she will be in participating in TAP: The Austin Project, a 13 week workshop for womyn of color writers.

Diepiriye S. Kuku-Siemons, OC’97 graduated from Oberlin College in 1997 with a major in Biochemistry and a minor in African-American Studies. While at Oberlin, he taught and choreographed for the Essence dance performance, performed with Dance Diaspora, and co-founded Black Oasis Dance troupe. He was the first Third World Co-op OSCA Board representative and was active in Third World House, LGBU, Zami, and Abusua. Since graduation he spent two years in the Peace Corps supporting small-scale cooperatives in northern Mali , taught ESL for two years in Korea, and earned his MPH in International Health Development from Tulane University. He has also worked for the Institute of Human Rights establishing a prison HIV/AIDS and health education program and was a consultant for Sri Lanka’s first prison drug rehabilitation program. He is currently working on his doctorate at Delhi University School of Economics in the Department of Sociology. He is also an AAKAR Fellow and consultant for Oxfam (India) Trust working on HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and support strategies for rural youth in four high prevalence Indian states.

* Biographical information for Diepiriye S. Kuku-Siemons was provided by the Sexual Information Center.

Desiree Pipkins, OC '05 majored in African American Studies. While at Oberlin, she was an active member of Student Senate, Third World Co-op and Abusua. She is currently the Research Director for the NAACP in Washington D.C. As part of her many responsibilities, she is coordinating the efforts of social justice organizations, including LGBT and Queer organizations, around Supreme Court and lower court nominations.

Khary Polk, OC '00 is a McCracken Fellow in New York University ’s doctoral program in American Studies. His fiction, essays, and art criticism have appeared on Nerve.com and in Think Again, Corpus, If We Have To Take Tomorrow and the Journal of Negro History. A former student of David Updike’s at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown , he wrote the cover essay for The Studio Museum of Harlem’s most recent gallery catalog, Frequency. His dissertation project, “Soldier Sojourners: African American Internationalism and Military Diasporas,” considers the peripatetic dispersal and displacement of African Americans around the globe via the engine of the United States military. During his time at Oberlin, Khary was a Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellow, a Bonner Community Service Scholar, and an Andy Cemelli research LGBT grant recipient. He was a substitute teacher for the Oberlin Public Schools, a creative writing teacher and tutor counselor for the Upward Bound program, the editor-in-chief of The Dial literary magazine, an Academy of American Poets/Stuart Friebert Poetry Prize winner, house manager of Fuller Co-Op and a bartender at The Feve.  

*Biographical information for Khary Polk was provided by the Office of Undergraduate Research.

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