David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, died in April. He is receiving a great deal of posthumous attention because of the release of his new history of the Korean War, The Coldest Winter. But Rebecca Skloot, who teaches English at the University of Memphis, has been thinking less about Halberstam's work and more about the way he died.

Halberstam was killed in a car crash while being driven to an interview by a University of California at Berkeley journalism grad student. That fact is haunting Skloot in her new role overseeing a writers' program that brings authors from around the country to the University of Memphis campus. "With this new responsibility, I'm faced with deciding whether my graduate students should pick our visiting writers up at the airport and drive them around the city while they're in town."

Skloot's deliberations are colored by her own experiences as a graduate student, when she "met several authors who played important roles in inspiring and shaping me." George Plimpton apparently inspired her so much that she got the two of them "hopelessly lost in Baltimore."

Her decision? For now she is relegating her students to the back seat, where they can accompany a faculty member to the airport. "Is this crazy? Am I being overprotective? Probably," Skloot writes. "But I can't stop thinking about Halberstam's death."