Audrey Bilger

Perhaps you’ve seen them around campus: ceramic hearts, bright red, dangling from the arms of trees, glinting in the elusive sunlight. Reminders of love and loved ones that are perhaps more precious than ever right now as the global pandemic continues to disconnect us from one another. The secret agents behind this festoonery? President Audrey Bilger and her wife, Cheryl Pawelski. “Love is a superpower,” Bilger says.

Audrey Bilger owns a lot of “firsts.” First woman president of Reed College. First LGBTQ Reed prez. And, probably, the first college president to own a bigger record collection than her school’s entire student body. Bilger and her wife, Cheryl Pawelski, arrived on the 111-year-old school’s leafy Southeast Portland campus packing about 70,000 albums and CDs. Pawelski is a Grammy-winning record producer and music historian who co-owns the record label Omnivore (which Bilger named).

There was no script for Audrey Bilger’s career. So she wrote her own.

“College presidents have been described as the ‘narrators-in-chief’ of their institutions,” said University of Virginia alumna Audrey Bilger, who this summer will become the 16th president of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and the first woman to serve in that role. “My background as a scholar of literature and teacher in the classroom will be of enormous assistance to me in telling the impressive story of Reed College,” Bilger wrote in email from the West Coast.

Interviewed by Tyler Sonnemaker.

By Steven Petrow. Audrey Bilger, a professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College and an editor of “Here Come the Brides! Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage,” said that gays and lesbians “grow up with the same movies, go to the same rituals as straight people, and when we want to commit to one another it’s not surprising that we would choose the same forms.” “We’re claiming the right to equal citizenship — to dream the same dream as straight people,” she said. “That’s a big deal.”

A new book co-edited by CMC's Associate Professor of Literature Audrey Bilger gives "a snapshot of the time we're living in," and tells the stories of lesbians grappling with the issue of marriagewhether they're married, or against marriage, or whether they're hoping at some point to be able to marry.

Interviewed by John Hayes.

Audrey Bilger and Cheryl Pawelski make a brief (blink and you'll miss it!) cameo appearance in this fun Butchies video—14 seconds in.