Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Miriam Farah '23 graduated cum laude from Claremont McKenna College with a dual major in public policy and history with departmental honors and a minor in gender and sexuality studies. During her senior year, Farah wrote a year-long history thesis titled "The Criminalization of Girls' Mental Illness: Race, Gender, and Class in Juvenile Collaborative Courts," which won the best thesis in history and gender studies. On campus, she was heavily involved with the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and worked for Claremont Canopy, a nonprofit organization aimed to help resettle immigrants in Southern California. In high school, Farah explored her interest in the legal field by interning for McGregor Law Corp., a criminal defense law firm for three summers, and Teen Court. Her college coursework and previous experience in criminal law inspired her passion for civil rights law, leading her to work for Haysbert & Moultrie LLP, the Fair Housing and Community Development Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Constitutional Accountability Center. Since graduation, she has been working as a civil rights paralegal at Relman Colfax, a private public interest firm in Washington, DC focused on fair housing and fair lending. In her free time, Farah likes spending time with her family and friends, exploring D.C., and being outdoors. 

Valentina Gonzalez '23 is the Media Coordinator in the communications and external affairs department at the Vera Institute of Justice. In her role, Gonzalez tracks and distributes earned media, manages media inquiries, pitches Vera products to various news outlets, and manages administrative operations, supporting efforts to deliver messaging that advances the Institute's mission to reform the criminal legal and immigration systems. Before joining Vera in 2024, Gonzalez worked as an Elbaz Fellow in the communications division at Human Rights Watch (HRW). At HRW, she supported media strategy for research products on international human rights issues and contributed to large-scale media coverage and postproduction analytics of various products. During her fellowship, she directly worked on projects about Israel/Palestine, immigration in the U.S., the United Nations’ annual Climate Change Conference (COP28), and HRW’s 2024 World Report. Gonzalez earned a BA in International Relations with a sequence in Human Rights, Genocide, and Holocaust Studies from Claremont McKenna College in 2023. 

Michelle Ramirez '23 graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a degree in Public Policy and a Human Rights Sequence and has since been working as an impact litigation paralegal at Children's Rights. While at Claremont McKenna, Ramirez completed her senior thesis on “Examining the Equity of California’s School Funding Formula,” which aimed to measure the impact of equity-oriented school finance reforms in California on student achievement. Before joining Children’s Rights, she interned for the Learning Rights Law Center, the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, and the Department for the Execution of Judgments at the Council of Europe. In her free time, Ramirez likes going to yoga, exploring new cuisines in New York City, and spending time with friends.  

Yi Shun Lai '96 is the author, most recently, of the young adult historical novel A Suffragist's Guide to the Antarctic (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Her memoir, Pin Ups, was published in 2020, and her debut novel, Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu, was published in 2016. She has delivered inclusivity workshops to everyone from AAA video-game studios to international nonprofits, and also teaches in an MFA program for Creative Nonfiction. She graduated from Claremont McKenna College in 1996 and recently returned to campus as CMC's Assistant Director of Fellowships Advising. When she's not on campus or writing, she can be found teaching her intractable dog useless tricks.

This presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and the Elbaz Family Post-Graduate Fellowship Program.