Ann-Janine Morey

AJ Morey ('73) is Job Title::Associate Vice Provost for Cross Disciplinary Studies and Planning at College::James Madison University. She sang in the now-defunct Activity::Scarleteers and Tanagers (Grinnell), starred in The Fantasticks and went on to even less fame in The Ivory Tower, After Dark, Loose Gravel and her current musical adventure, MayDay. Besides a great husband and two children, both of them now larger than she is, she loves horses and has two of them. They are larger than AJ as well.

First Person Voice

While at Grinnell I lived in Gates, Mears, Gates again, and then off campus in my last year. I was a Religious Studies major and almost double majored in either English or American Studies. My recollection is that I didn't double major because I didn't want to write a thesis. The upheaval associated with the war in Vietnam made a lasting impact on me, and especially the experience of being interrogated by the FBI, as did the intense ethos of social consciousness that pervaded the campus. It was an amazing time to be in college.

I went to graduate school in Religion and Ethics at the University of Southern California, because I had just gotten married and my then-husband was already at USC. I couldn't think of anything else to do, and I loved school. Not surprisingly, I ended up being a university professor and then administrator. But before crossing to the dark side (academic joke about administrators), I published three books, Apples and Ashes: Culture, Metaphor and the American Dream (1982); Religion and Sexuality in American Literature (1992) and What Happened to Christopher: An American Family's story of Shaken Baby Syndrome (1998). This last book was the result of jury duty, served when my son was 9 months old, so the story of brutal child death really changed my life. I decided I didn't want to write academic prose anymore. So, I work on things that please me, which includes a long-range study of antique photographs of people and their dogs. Ask me about it--I love sharing these pictures, and I'm looking for a way to use them for humane society fundraising.

I married Todd Hedinger in 1986, and we have two children, Lucia (17) and Gabriel (14). Todd is a social services counselor and a musician. He and a buddy are just starting to play out as a funk-duo (funk!), under the name "Todd is my Co-Pilot."