Staff Kudos: New Books Inspire with Women's Empowerment and Poetry

Staff kudos is an occasional column that recognizes recent accomplishments by Arts and Sciences staff. Did you or a colleague recently receive an award or celebrate an achievement? Let us know!

Empowering women to rediscover their self-worth

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As director of human resources for the Arts and Sciences, Olivia Jaras champions equity and advocates for systems that allow people to thrive, a role that complements her work outside of Dartmouth in women's financial empowerment.

In her latest book, Enough: A Woman's Journey to Self-Empowerment and Wealth, Jaras celebrates the quiet strength, emotional intelligence, and resilience that define feminine leadership. Released on March 18, it quickly climbed to the top of Amazon's new releases list.

Jaras wrote the book's prologue the day she had to put down her beloved family dog, Skipper. Rather than push through the pain—something many women, she says, have been conditioned to do—she allows herself to sit with it. In an exercise that appears later in the book, she invites readers to grieve the losses they've experienced throughout their lives, encouraging them along their own healing journeys.

This introspective work embodies the message of Enough—for women to recognize their own needs, listen to themselves, and know that they are already enough.

"When a woman truly believes she is enough—not just intellectually but deeply knows it in her bones—it changes everything," Jaras says. "She stops contorting herself to fit expectations and starts moving through life with a quiet certainty. From that place, she no longer chases opportunities, they find her. And not just any opportunities, but the ones that reflect her truest self. That inner knowing is magnetic. It's powerful. And it's deeply overdue for so many of us."

Jaras adapted the lessons and practical exercises in the book from a Forbes workshop series she led with groups of female participants. To recreate the sense of community and support from the workshop environment, she includes her own responses to the activities on the page and invites readers to grow with her. 

"Writing Enough meant standing beside the reader in the rawness of becoming," Jaras says. "I didn't want to offer a polished narrative from a mountaintop; I wanted to share the messy middle, the doubts, the reckoning. Because it's in that shared vulnerability that we feel less alone."

Embracing voice and song

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Carlene Kucharczyk's debut poetry collection, Strange Hymn, will hit shelves on April 4. The collection won the 2024 Juniper Prize for Poetry, which included publication by the University of Massachusetts Press.

The poet spends her work days among kindred spirits as an administrative assistant in the Department of English and Creative Writing.

Growing up, Kucharczyk always had a creative outlet. Over the years, her passion for singing and writing song lyrics naturally transitioned to creative writing and poetry. She developed her craft when she earned an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University.

"A big part of my process is reading the poems out loud," she says. "What I'm allegiant to most is really the sound. I'll try to transcribe how it sounds as I'm reading it and try to capture what it looks like on the page in terms of form and line breaks. It's a back-and-forth process."

This foundation of song and sound is reflected in Strange Hymn. The collection of 24 lyrical poems explores morality and humanity, blurring the lines between history and myth, love and grief, and song and silence.

"Kucharczyk doesn't shy away from painful insights, she states things straightforwardly, and quietly, which somehow makes the book's keen observations both harder to bear and clear," Vievee Francis, poet and professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing, said of the debut collection. "Read this haunting group of poems and you too may find yourself, suddenly in a drama of 'Curtains' crying 'on the floor,' overwhelmed by 'shadows that often appear without an overture.' Or the feeling of your own 'Blood rivering' through these most compelling songs."

"A lot of poems refer to singing but in different ways," Kucharczyk says. "And there is a sense of voice—a human voice singing—that's a thread throughout the collection. Each of us has our own distinct human voice that's so specific."

Kucharczyk wrote the poems over the course of five years, without consciously connecting them as a collection. "They felt like loose poems to me, but it was friends and fellow writers who helped me see that they were connected by voice," she says.

Poetry readings allow Kucharczyk's voice to shine on every level. With the release of her collection this spring, she will take part in several local readings, including one hosted by Dartmouth Libraries on April 15.