Arts & Sciences

WashU Libraries has received a remarkable gift of 513 letters by U.S. poet laureate Howard Nemerov from a surprising source — the family of Nemerov’s lover. For two decades, Nemerov wrote to Joan Coale of Philadelphia about his work, family and life as a WashU faculty member. This month, Coale’s son presented the letters to Nemerov’s son.

Pannill Camp, an associate professor of drama in Arts & Sciences, has won the Oscar G. Brockett Essay Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research.

Nine players take to the pitch. The competition is fast, creative and ruthless. And that’s before they meet the other team. In “The Wolves,” which opens Feb. 21 in Edison Theatre, Pulitzer-nominated playwright Sarah DeLappe captures the raw energy, unfiltered banter and accumulating pressure of an elite girls’ soccer team.

A new neural network model by researchers at Washington University offers a way to uncover what brain mechanisms are at play when people need to focus amid many distractions.

Tasman Ezra, a graduate student in biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, founded a conservation organization dedicated to conserving reptiles, amphibians and their habitats in Honduras.

A graduate student in Arts & Sciences at WashU will study ways to improve the lives of people with disabilities.

As founder and producing director of The Black Rep, Ron Himes has worked with scores of playwrights to stage hundreds of shows, including dozens of world premieres. This spring, The Black Rep will present new plays by two celebrated young dramatists: Melda Beaty’s Coconut Cake and Kelundra Smith’s The Wash.

In The Wedding People, Alison Espach crafts a bestselling novel that celebrates and skewers our most beloved and absurd ritual, while offering wisdom on how start anew.

Politicians often claim to know what kind of government the founders would have wanted. Presidential historian Peter Kastor was struck by the relative lack of scholarship around an obvious follow-up question: What kind of government did the founders actually create?

Chemists in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis have received a $1 million contract from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to develop a quicker way to detect mustard gas and prevent exposure.