Staff Bios-- Kali

Kali Amos

My majors include English Literature and Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies. I plan on applying for Teach for America. I am going to graduate school and will possibly go on to get my Ph. D. I am still deciding whether I want to teach at the high school or college level.

Besides PRiSM, I am also involved in the Art Museum Student Organization, Sigma Tau Delta, and the Association for Women Students. You can also find me serving up unfathomable amounts of bacon to the masses at Alexander Dining Hall.

Best things about Miami: hazelnut cocoa in the vending machine at Bachelor, the comfy chairs in front of the large windows at Wertz library, all of the Russian program professors/classes, and getting lost in the nature trails behind East Quad.

Best things about Oxford: the fact that you can walk from one end to the other in about twenty minutes, the Kulfi (and pretty much everything else) at Rohan India, Kofenya, Kona Bistro on my birthday, The Bird House Antique Store, watching movies in the tiny theaters of the Princess...

I don't really have a favorite genre-I am willing to try anything that wasn't mass produced to the point where merchandise became involved...although I do have a very strange fondness for dystopian novels.

Barbara Kingsolver, Jack Kerouac, Leslie Mormon Silko, James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Emily Dickinson, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Svetlana Vasilenko, Anna Akhmatova, Franz Kafka, Margaret Atwood, and yes sometimes even Ayn Rand.

I think that spelling favorite the British way should be allowed only when one says it aloud with a halfway decent fake British accent.

The main thing that I look for in good writing is that feeling you get when you have finished the very last word and you can set the piece down and just say to yourself "Oh". I consider something good if it lingers in my thoughts after I have put the book down. That is what good literature is--it is something that takes hold of you and refuses to let go no matter how hard you try. It becomes a part of you and it changes the way you think, even if the change is so small that you fail to recognize it.

I love to use ellipses…but have a very violent relationship with commas (I am a big contender for allowing thoughts to wander). Despite my wandering thoughts I am a very organized person as can be seen by the fact that I have a separate container for my socks within my dresser drawer. I have a permanent attachment to my iPod, and am a firm believer that hot chocolate can cure all ailments.

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."
-Francis Bacon