Skip to the content of the web site.

Mrs. Leslie (née Fujita) Straus (BA 1965)

Mrs. Leslie (Fujita) Straus     Retirement didn’t last long for Mrs. Leslie (Fujita) Straus (BA 1965), who recently began her post-retirement career as the President of SkyRiver, a start-up library technology company based in Emeryville, California that provides online cataloguing services to libraries. Leslie’s passion for librarianship grew from her student assistant jobs in the UW library, which led her to the (then) School of Library Science at the University of Toronto. Prior to retirement #1 she spent “many years in and around libraries, mostly on the outside as a service provider.” Before retiring, she was the Vice President of worldwide sales and marketing for Innovative Interfaces, a global library system provider.

Mrs. Leslie (Fujita) Straus     “What critical sense I have is grounded in English courses I took and any writing skills I have are similarly grounded. Both have been key to helping me think strategically and communicate within the library marketplace,” Leslie says. “The survey courses in my first and second years [at Waterloo], given by Professor Keith Thomas, provided a perspective on and history of English language and literature to which I had never been exposed before.” She found the Victorian Literature course, taught by Professor C.F. MacRae, to be the most memorable.

     Studying English at UW helped Leslie to foster the “feeling [that] I was really learning something of value and learning about how literature, history and philosophy are intertwined.”