Anna-Lisa Cox, Hope graduate (and daughter of English Professor John Cox), is featured on National Public Radio for her research on Covert, Michigan, Dr. Cox is an active historian, writer, and lecturer on the history of race relations in the nineteenth-century Midwest. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her research, including the National Endowment for the Humanities Younger Scholars Award, the Gilder Lehrman Foundation Fellowship, and the Pew Younger Scholars Fellowship. She received her M.Phil. in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and her Ph.D. in American history from the University of Illinois. She is currently a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library of Chicago. Dr. Cox first got interested in studying Covert while a senior at Hope College in Michigan. She had to do a senior paper in history and wanted to do local history because she already loved doing primary research (i.e. working with original documents, not just books). Hope College was about twenty miles from Covert, and a friend told her about the old and established African American community living there. As to why she found an integrated community interesting, that is a more complicated issue. Anna-Lisa was raised by parents who were passionate believers in integration and equal rights for all Americans, and her mother was an active participant in the Civil Rights struggles in Chicago in the late 1960's. These were not dead values, rather, her family daily lived out its beliefs in integration and equality. More information about A Stronger Kinship: One Town's Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith can be found here.

1998 Hope graduate Sufjan Stevens is featured on the website of NPR-- http://www.npr.org/programs/asc/index.html#stevens. Sufjan has become a critically acclaimed singer-songwriter. One of his goals is to release a recording on every state in the Union. The NPR story features a commissioned work by Stevens on the small farming town of Brinkley, Ark., and the ivory-billed woodpecker which was once thought extinct.

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