Morningside Connect

The English and Modern Languages programs—combined into one department in 2014-2015—keep things lively on the third floor of Lewis Hall. Department activities alumni remember are still going strong.

Friday is Writing Day continues to celebrate campus writing every week, and students (and sometimes alumni) travel to Spring Green, Wis., in the fall to see classical plays at American Players Theatre. The student-edited Kiosk has garnered awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association and the American Collegiate Press Association. Sigma Tau Delta sponsors spoken word slams, soup days, service projects, and trips to the national conventions. More recently, English students have created a Writers’ Guild organization.

The English program has sponsored other trips to explore graduate schools, see other theatre productions, and visit literary sites such as Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, Neb. Students in both programs have presented research and creative writing at the college’s annual Palmer Undergraduate Research Symposium and at the other local, regional, and national conferences. Spanish Club is going strong, recently sponsoring a Carnavale event in Dimmitt Hall.

Our students graduate from Morningside College to pursue a variety of careers, and others head for graduate school in law, literary studies, creative writing, and interdisciplinary fields. While at Morningside College, many pursue the college’s increasing number of study abroad opportunities.

Faculty and Staff News

Steve Coyne, Amber Harris-Leichner, and Marty Knepper (English) and Gail Ament and Patrick Blaine (Modern Languages), along with invaluable administrative assistant Marcie Ponder, model for our students the value of travel, research, and creative writing.

Marcie Ponder graduated in December 2015 from Morningside College. Steve Coyne’s novel, It Turns Out Like This, will be published through New Rivers Press in October Marty Knepper’s The Book of Iowa Films, co-authored with John Lawrence, appeared in fall of 2014, and Marty is featured as a commentator at the State Historical Museum of Iowa’s Hollywood in the Heartland exhibit in Des Moines, through June, 2017 (www.bookofiowafilms.com). Amber Harris-Leichner had two poems published last year in Scholars and Poets Talk about Queens.

Patrick Blaine has written a chapter for a book, which is a wide-reaching study of the political documentary in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Blaine’s chapter discusses the 40-year career of Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, and the cinematic strategies that he uses to represent absences in post-dictatorial society. Gail Ament’s translations of several poems by Honduran writers were published in Honduras: Women’s Poems of Protest and Resistance (2009-2013): Spanish-English Bilingual Edition, ed. María Roof.

Our faculty members, with Marcie’s assistance, have recently sponsored semester-long or May Term trips to Italy, Guatemala, Cuba, Ireland, England, and Vietnam and Cambodia–and have traveled themselves in and outside the country for conferences and for professional development, including Gail Ament’s summer trips to Oaxaca, Mexico.

We Welcome News of Your Activities

We would love to hear from our alums. Please send your news to Marcie Ponder.