Kita Douglas, who received the Lieutenant Governor’s Silver Medal as the top master's student for program achievement at the Spring 2012 convocation, has a pot of okra growing on her North Carolina porch. The mother of two, now in a doctoral program at Duke University, focussed her UVic master’s essay on a different type of flora: the Jimson weed in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. It is ironic that she studied a plant: tilling the earth is in her family background. Douglas moved to Victoria after 10 years on the mainland and a childhood in BC’s interior, where her father’s family were farmers in the Columbia River basin. The focus of Douglas’s graduate coursework is on ethnicity, health and the environment in American literature. 

Read more about her story in the June 2012 issue of The Ring: Weeds and verdure in literature and life.