Hannah Withers '11

Los Angeles, California
Major: English

Out of the cradle: Withers's ankle tattoo, "busy busy busy," quotes Kurt Vonnegut's book Cat's Cradle, in which the phrase is uttered in response to situations revealing "how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is." Why this tattoo: "It was an early instance of reading a thought I'd been wrestling with, that another human being had written out in its simplest and most elegant fashion. The way I express myself has always been based in language. Vonnegut was the first writer who showed me the magic a writer is capable of."