ASHEVILLE NC – UNC Asheville today dedicated the “TD Bank Atrium” in Rhoades Hall, in honor of a major gift from TD Bank to the university. The atrium on the first floor of the newly and greenly renovated building is a popular study and meeting spot for environmental studies and other science students. Rhoades Hall houses science classrooms, labs and offices.
UNC Asheville dedicated the atrium in recognition of TD Bank’s gift of $200,000 to the UNC Asheville Foundation. The gift, given in 2011, took the form of a reduced purchase price paid by the Foundation for the 8.9-acre land parcel at 525 Broadway, adjacent to campus. A portion of that parcel will be used as part of the greenway along Reed Creek linking UNC Asheville and the Montford neighborhood with downtown.
“TD Bank is diligently working to be as green as our logo and helping UNC Asheville purchase the greenway land fits this vision,” said Charles Frederick, North Carolina market president for TD Bank. “TD Bank is proud to have our name on this beautiful atrium, which is used by students in the natural sciences, who will become leaders in environmental stewardship.”
“This new atrium brings important features to one of our main classroom buildings that will allow our values of environmental responsibility and top quality education to be visible to all,” said UNC Asheville Chancellor Anne Ponder. “We are so very grateful to TD Bank for their role in making this a reality.”
With large energy-efficient windows that provide natural lighting, the TD Bank Atrium has a prominent video dashboard displaying energy and water use to show the impact of Rhoades Hall’s green features and provide a reminder to conserve.
The naming ceremony took place on Thursday, May 16, in the TD Bank Atrium and also featured remarks by Keith Krumpe, UNC Asheville dean of natural sciences, Cissie Stevens, chair of UNC Asheville’s Board of Trustees, and Charles Wood, chair of the UNC Asheville Foundation Board of Directors.
ASHEVILLE NC – Music of the 50s will resound when the Reuter Center Singers perform at 7 p.m. on Friday, May 17, at UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center, home to OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
The Reuter Center Singers, OLLI’s community chorus directed by Chuck Taft, will “Rewind to the 50s” and perform some of that decade’s greatest hits. Many members of the chorus will be taken back to their own youth as they sing “A Teenager in Love,” “Love Me Tender,” “Lollipop,” “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” and more.
The concert is free and open to the public. For more information, visit OLLI’s website or call 828.251.6140.
ASHEVILLE NC – “Write Now,” a creative writing program for high school students, will return to UNC Asheville this summer with workshops held weekdays, June 17-28, from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. “Write Now” offers each participating student experience in different styles of writing – fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry – under the tutelage of three of Asheville‘s finest writing instructors.
Students will have workshops each day with memoirist Janet Hurley, feature writer and novelist Elizabeth Lutyens and poet Vievee Francis. Joining these three experienced instructors in shaping the program is Tommy Hays, executive director of UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program. Students will participate in discussions, activities and exercises, share and critique each others’ writing, and read works on writers’ craft.
Hurley will lead sessions on creative non-fiction, including memoir, magazine features, multi-media essays and explorations of historical events. With discussions of the ethics of “true stories” and how craft considerations of fiction and poetry apply, as well as experiential activities and writing exercises, the first week will prepare students for producing and workshopping one complete creative non-fiction work in the second week. A freelance writer who has published articles in Our State and VERVE magazines, Hurley is a teaching artist in Asheville City Schools, as well as founding director of the True Ink program for young writers.
Lutyens’ sessions will tap students’ own experiences as sources for creating fictional characters, settings and a plot with a clear beginning, middle and end. Participants also will read published stories and novel excerpts, learning to read from a writer’s perspective. By the end of the program, students should have completed a first draft of at least one short story. Lutyens teaches the Prose Master Class at the Great Smokies Writing Program and led a writing/critiquing exchange program between her adult students in Asheville and 11th and 12th graders at Boston Latin Academy. Her novel-in-progress was a semi-finalist in the 2011 William Faulkner-Wisdom Competition.
Francis’ contemporary poetry sessions will use reading, writing exercises and games to jump right into today’s literary practices and approaches. Students will look at pop culture’s influence on poets, from comic books to coffee, movies to improv, fastidiousness to fast food. Francis will invite students to muddy the lines between what is spoken and what is written and have fun while writing. Francis has authored two books of poetry – Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006) and Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012) – and formerly taught high school poets through the InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit.
“Write Now” is a program of the Asheville Graduate Center at UNC Asheville. The session fee is $445, which includes course instruction, materials, required books and lunch each day. For more information and to register, visit the Asheville Graduate Center website, or contact Nancy Williams at nwilliam@unca.edu or at 828.250.2353.
ASHEVILLE NC – Sister Helen Prejean, the author, activist and nun who sparked national dialogue on the death penalty and whose book inspired the film “Dead Man Walking,” will speak at UNC Asheville, and the university will host a concert-style performance of the opera of the same name. Prejean’s talk, “The Journey Continues,” will take place at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, April 26, and is free and open to the public. The concert starts at 8 p.m. Both events take place in Lipinsky Auditorium.
Prejean began ministering to inmates on death row in 1981 and served as chair of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty from 1993-95. Her book “Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States” (Random House, 1993) was adapted for the screen in 1995, and the film “Dead Man Walking,” starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, was seen by millions and nominated for four Academy Awards.
Prejean also is the author of “The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions” (Random House, 2004) and is the honorary chairperson of Moratorium Campaign, a group gathering signatures for a world-wide moratorium on the death penalty.
“Dead Man Walking,” which speaks of faith, redemption and the struggles of families of murder victims as well as death row inmates, became the basis of an opera composed by Jake Heggie, with libretto by Terrence McNally. The opera, which premiered by the San Francisco Opera in 2000, will be presented concert style at UNC Asheville by The Modern American Music Project.
The performance will feature Jane Bunnell, Elise Quagliata, Christiaan Smith-Kotlarek, Simone Vigilante, and children’s and adult choirs. Tickets for the public range from $25-$40 and are available online at tmamp.org/productions.html or by phone at 800/595-4849. A limited number of tickets for UNC Asheville students are available for $5; and $15 for faculty/staff/OLLI members. For UNC Asheville affiliate tickets, visit the Cultural Events and Special Academic Programs website or call 828.251.6674.
ASHEVILLE NC – Dr. Jonathan Shay, a renowned psychiatrist who has specialized in treating veterans of war, will offer three public talks, April 9-11, at UNC Asheville. He also will meet with UNC Asheville’s Student-Veteran Alliance as well as students and community members.
The following events take place on the UNC Asheville campus and are free and open to the public:
Tuesday, April 9 – “Moral Luck,” an examination of philosophical experiences of soldiers in combat, from Homer’s “The Iliad” to present day. 7:30 p.m., Sherrill Center, Mountain View Room.
Wednesday, April 10 – “Theatre of War,” exploring the role of the arts in healing of the physically and psychologically wounded. 7.30 p.m.,Highsmith University Union, Alumni Hall.
Thursday, April 11 – “Open Discussion – Sleep, Community and other Hobby Horses.” Dr. Shay will lead a discussion with veterans and members of the community encouraged to participate. 7.30 p.m., Sherrill Center, Mountain View Room.
A clinical psychiatrist and humanities scholar, Dr. Shay is the author of groundbreaking books on the nature and treatment of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), and he is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
His visit to UNC Asheville is sponsored by the university’s NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor in Humanities, Sophie Mills, who champions the use of ancient classics to understand contemporary issues. “By using Homer to illuminate modern veterans’ experiences, he has created a powerful body of work that has broadened and deepened the understanding of humanists, military leaders and psychologists concerning military combat and its effects on human beings,” she says.
Dr. Shay views PTSD as a psychological injury of war, not a mental disorder. In a New York Times interview, Shay said that when soldiers return home, they often retain behaviors they adopted for their survival in combat. “Most of it really boils down to the valid adaptations in the mind and body to the real situation of other people trying to kill you,” he said.
“Your senses are heightened and your nerves are sensitive to everything at first,” says Kevin Rumley, an Iraq War veteran who is now a UNC Asheville senior and a member of the university’s Student-Veteran Alliance. As part of a Marine unit stationed near the Syrian border, he faced daily gunfights and IED blasts, one of which caused him serious injuries and took the life of his best friend. “Re-acclimating, transitioning to the civilian environment and into an academic environment, that’s where most of the hard work comes in,” he says. “You can do rehab on the body injuries and you’ll see progress, but PTSD is this elusive beast, it’s really tough. To have someone like Dr. Shay coming, I think that can be really valuable.”
Dr. Shay’s books have been acclaimed by some of America’s most prominent veterans. Senators John McCain and Max Cleland co-authored the forward to Dr. Shay’s “Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming” (Scribner, 2002). His earlier book, “Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character” (Simon & Schuster, 1995), also examined the experience of modern solders through the lens of ancient classics.
Dr. Shay is a retired staff psychiatrist who served at the Department of Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic in Boston. He earned M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as a visiting scholar-at-large at the U.S. Naval War College, and was chair of ethics, leadership, and personnel policy in the Office of the U.S. Army Chief of Staff for Personnel.
For more information, contact Sophie Mills at 828/251-6296.
ASHEVILLE NC – The Great Smokies Writing Program presents a two-hour workshop, “Get Your Book Published: Which way to go and how to get there,” at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 7 in UNC Asheville’s Karpen Hall, Laurel Forum.
Cynn Chadwick, author of five published books including the “Cat Rising” series, and lecturer in creative writing at UNC Asheville, will lead the workshop. She will share experiences in bringing her works to the market, both through traditional and self-publishing channels.
A tax-deductible donation at the door of $25 to the Great Smokies Writing Program is suggested. To reserve a spot or make an inquiry, send your name, email address, phone number, and topic of interest or question to Marie Hefley, managing editor of the Great Smokies Review, at princesshef@hotmail.com.
ASHEVILLE NC – Job and internship seekers have an opportunity to meet representatives of many area employers at UNC Asheville’s 2013 Internship and Job Fair. The fair is free and open to all degree-seeking college students and graduates, and offers a chance to learn more about part-time, seasonal and full-time jobs and internship opportunities. The event takes place from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday, March 19, in the Kimmel Arena Concourse.
Participants include the Biltmore Company, City of Asheville, Mission Health, Peace Corps, Buncombe County Schools, CVS Pharmacy, HomeTrust Banking Partnership, many area summer camps and many more local businesses and organizations. The Internship and Job Fair provides an opportunity for participants to network and exchange information with various industry and non-profit representatives.
The event is co-sponsored by the UNC Asheville Career Center and the Student Government Association. For more information, including the list of participants, call the Career Center at 828.251.6515, or visit the Career Center website.
ASHEVILLE NC – UNC Asheville will host a sexual harassment “speak-out” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 28, in the Laurel Forum in Karpen Hall. The speak-out will bring voice to diverse experiences of sexual harassment, and provide information about preventing and defending oneself against sexual harassment. The event is free and open to the public.
Participants will have the opportunity to share personal stories and raise questions in person. The speak-out is designed to raise awareness of sexual harassment, and provide information on how to report, prevent and address such situations, to help create equal and just workplace and school environments. Shared stories will be a key component of this event.
ASHEVILLE NC – The energy documentary “Switch” will be screened at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 20 at UNC Asheville in Rhodes-Robinson Hall, Room 125 and at 4 p.m. Feb. 21 in Ferguson Auditorium at A-B Tech Community College.
The screenings are in observance of National Engineers Week and will provide the public a wide-ranging, objective and pragmatic look at the complete spectrum of energy generation, including nuclear, fossil-fueled and renewable resources.
Sponsored by E4 Carolinas, directed by Arcos Films and Harry Lynch and co-produced and narrated by Dr. Scott Tinker, the free screenings provide the public an opportunity to see concise assessments of the energy technologies’ attributes and challenges. The screenings are made possible by the Colburn Earth Science Museum.
Following the UNC Asheville showing, a panel of energy professionals will discuss with the audience the energy industry in the Carolinas. Jeffrey Wilcox, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at UNC Asheville will host the Feb. 20 panel, which will include his faculty colleague, Kevin Moorhead, Professor of Environmental Studies, and others. The Feb. 21 showing, which is being hosted by the Institute for Climate Education at A-B Tech, will be followed by a Q&A session with Jon Snover, Director of the Global Institute for Sustainability Technologies at the College.
The documentary explores the world’s leading energy sites, including some that are highly restricted and never before seen on film. Tinker aims to provide straight answers from the people driving energy today — international leaders of government, industry and academia – and to cut through the confusion to create a common understanding of what the energy future holds.
About the documentary
“Switch” was filmed in 11 countries at 27 energy sites, ranging from the Evanger Hydropower Plant in Norway to La Hague’s nuclear recycling center in Normandy, France, the Andasol concentrating solar station in Granada, Spain, and the Belle Ayr Coal Mine in Wyoming.
It includes 53 expert interviews, 24 renewable energy specialists, 19 fossil energy specialists, 11 plant managers for all energy types, 10 of the world’s leading energy experts in government and academia and nine CEOs of international energy companies, fossil and renewable.
About E4 Carolinas
E4 Carolinas is a not-for-profit corporation that convenes industry, research and educational institutions, innovators, economic development organizations, and public leaders to coordinate the energy industry cluster in the Carolinas. “E4″ stands for energy, economy, environment and efficiency reflecting the organizations focus on innovation, effective energy policies, and a growing energy workforce in the Carolinas.
ASHEVILLE NC – For the seventh year in a row, UNC Asheville was selected as one of the “Best Value” public colleges in the nation by The Princeton Review. “Best Value Colleges: 2013 Edition,” profiling the top 75 public colleges and top 75 private colleges, was published today; the rankings were also reported in today’s edition of USA Today.
“The liberal arts tradition is alive and well at UNC Asheville, where students are encouraged to question, to discuss,” according to The Princeton Review. The guidebook also credits the university with preparing graduates for today’s tough job market: “The myriad research opportunities help flesh out a résumé, and the stress on real world application gets students job-ready before they even set foot outside the mountains.”
Students told The Princeton Review they appreciate the small class size at UNC Asheville and a feeling that “faculty are overwhelmingly supportive of the students … they know our names.” One student described UNC Asheville as “a school that promotes the growth of its students with an emphasis on a personal approach to undergraduate education.” The Princeton Review concluded that “UNC Asheville is an inexpensive way to achieve an excellent education, at a school that may be less intimidating than a larger institution.”
UNC Asheville students described the university as “a lot of fun to live at,” in the “amazing and quirky city” of Asheville. The Princeton Review noted the university’s mountain location with ready access to outdoor sports and activities, so in the words of one student, “you are never bored.” Last April, Princeton Review also listed UNC Asheville among America’s “green” colleges and universities.
The Princeton Review selected the top 150 institutions from among a larger pool of 650 colleges selected for academic excellence. Its rankings are based on institutional data, surveys of university administrators and student opinion surveys collected in 2011-12. The selection criteria focused on undergraduate academics, costs and financial aid.
The Princeton Review’s assessment of UNC Asheville echoes many other prominent college rankings. In September, UNC Asheville was ranked seventh in the nation among public liberal arts colleges by U.S. News & World Report, which also listed the university among those where students graduate with the least amount of debt. UNC Asheville was also praised for value and quality by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Forbes magazine, and the “Fiske Guide to Colleges” called UNC Asheville “one of the best education bargains in the country.”
ASHEVILLE NC – UNC Asheville today dedicated the “TD Bank Atrium” in Rhoades Hall, in honor of a major gift from TD Bank to the university. The atrium on the first floor of the newly and greenly renovated building is a popular study and meeting spot for environmental studies and other science students. Rhoades Hall houses science classrooms, labs and offices.
