Mountain Area Information Network: Quilting our mountain city with wireless broadband.

A David v. Goliath project--wireless broadband v. dsl and cable--where MAIN's offering deserves, at the very least, equal consideration. Here, via a mini-site, we wanted to plainly present our case, describe rates and options, and involve the reader in the vital mission of building community. Art director: Benjamin Finch of Robin Easter Design.

Grief counseling for children at UT: "I'm looking for my friend."

Tricia McClam tells the story of a fourth grader in East Knoxville who shows up early for an appointment in her school’s library.

When asked why she’s there, she says, “I’m looking for my friend.”

Her friend is a graduate student who meets with her each week, reads to her, plays with her and listens to her, as part of a grief outreach program begun in the fall of 2008 by the University of Tennessee.

The children in the program are dealing with major, usually stunning, instances of loss and grief. They face circumstances that involve divorce, abandonment, suicide, murder, custody battles or a parent who’s been taken off to prison.

“Incredibly tough issues,” says Dr. McClam, professor and associate head of Educational Psychology and Counseling at the university. “The referrals I get, from school counselors, from principals, from social workers, take my breath away. It might be an uncle who was stabbed, a family member with a terminal illness or a parent who died during the night.”

“Three of the four children I’ve met with,” says graduate student Ashton Fisher, “have fathers in jail. And when you have one or both parents missing, it can have a major, major impact on self-esteem. They want someone to trust. They want to know that whatever they say is okay; that it won’t get them into trouble.”

For 25 graduate students in the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences engaged in grief counseling in the spring of 2009, signs of success may show up in “the little things,” says Dr. McClam.

“We all get together every Thursday morning and meet and talk about what’s going on for an hour and a half,” she says. “You might hear someone say that their client had started to talk, or ‘we had a great session,’ or ‘my client showed up yesterday.’ Little things.”

Little things that add up.

“The issues these children face have a major impact on performance in school and peer relationships,” Dr. McClam says. “We stay with them until they reach a point when they’re back on track academically and you can see behavioral changes in the classroom.”

“You cater to where they are,” says Ashton, “You give them the tools they need. Help them refocus on strengths. Then that ability gives them the control to move forward. It spills over into every other area of their lives.”

Grief Outreach from UT, what Dr. McClam calls “the most powerful kind of learning,” began as a simple, heart-stirring experience.

It began with a child named Aliyah at Sarah Moore Greene Elementary School where Dr. Bob Rider, dean of the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences, had been reading with students every Wednesday for four years.

When Dr. Rider asked the first-grader to read a book about Mother’s Day aloud to him, she told him her mother had died on the previous Valentine’s Day. Because of her grief, she had been held back in school, not adjusting socially and academically.

“I was at a loss for words,” Dr. Rider says. “I was thinking, ‘We have wonderful counseling programs at the university and other support services.’ I wanted to know how we could help.”

On October 1, 2008, the program that Dr. Rider’s experience triggered began accepting referrals. Graduate students training to become school psychologists, mental health counselors, and school counselors immediately signed on. And they continue to sign on, as part of a cohesive team, taking an active role in choosing those clients they feel they can best help.

“Our students come into the experience committed,” says Dr. McClam. “They have to be. They know how important it is.”

“It’s a very individual thing, getting to know your client,” says Ashton. “You don’t know how resistant they might be to being with you, to talking. In the four cases I’ve had, there was no resistance. These kids were hurting and they needed an outlet.”

The artfulness in drawing out the thoughts and questions and hurt the children carry is taken up in listening and patience.

“We talk about things and we skirt some things,” says Angela Mounger, another graduate student who has worked with four children, “but if you listen, you can hear between the lines and ask a question and get something going.

“I was meeting with a boy who’d lost his father and he talked about a movie he didn’t like. I asked him about what it was about and he said it was about a boy who’d lost his dad. That opened things up. Behind the silent stretches, there can be intense sadness and anger. So you want to give them a vocabulary, a way to label what they’re feeling,” Angela says. “They’re mostly in a family where everyone is hurting over what happened, so they have no one to talk to. They can’t bring up anything at home. As a result, they’re looking for a safe place.”

The grief initiative has largely focused on a single area of high poverty, some 16 square miles in East Knoxville, designated an “Empowerment Zone” in 1998 under a Clinton administration urban rebuilding program. But Dr. McClam is also receiving referrals from other areas of Knox County, saying that the number of children dealing with grief and loss in our community “is much greater than we anticipated.”

As Angela Mounger puts it, “I was overwhelmed by the amount of need out there.”

Beneficiaries of the program are not only the children themselves and their families, but graduate students who pour in their skills and time, commitment and heart; who wait patiently for signs.

“There’s no time line. It’s a process. We go at our client’s pace. And, moving that way, we watch them grow,” says Angela. “It’s very rewarding.”

“They’re resilient,” Ashton says. “It’s also impossible not to love them.”

For information and referrals, Dr. McClam may be reached at 865-974-3845 or mcclam@utk.edu.

Bringing Physics to Fentress County: Because a mind so inclined is a terrible thing to waste.

For Tammara Garrett, a high school senior in Fentress County, Tennessee, “doing a lot of electro-magnetic stuff and viewing the ultraviolet spectrum” became a welcome part of her day in this rural community where studying physics had previously been about as rare as spotting an ivory billed woodpecker.

Thanks to an innovative application of distance learning developed at the University of Tennessee, 30 college-bound science students in the county, along with their classroom teachers, were able to seize upon a jewel of a learning experience at a time when they really, really wanted it.

“For a serious student, this is great,” Tammara says, “I like the physical sciences and I saw this as an opportunity. I especially liked the hands-on work.”

Much of the course, taught as a block segment in the fall of 2008, did engage teachers and students in hands-on exercises illustrating the immutable laws of physics. But the basic teaching structure flowed out of interactive videoconferencing between the Nielsen Physics Building on the UT campus and a classroom in Fentress County where students from Clarkrange High School and the Alvin C. York Institute gathered up and took part in lectures and discussions.

The first inkling of an idea around this creative venture into distance learning emerged as Dr. Lynn Champion, director of Academic Outreach and Communications for the College of Arts and Sciences, considered the significant shortage of qualified physics teachers in the state.

“We had very capable and knowledgeable physics teachers here at UT Knoxville and interested Tennesse high school students without teachers,” she says. “The option that came to mind was distance education.”

According to Dr. Jon Levin of UT’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, a professor heavily involved in the project as both planner and instructor, there are fewer than 200 out of 300 public high schools in Tennessee that offered physics last year.

“Many rural schools in the state don’t have accredited teachers,” he says, “so we identified two we could target with distance education. The primary reason we’re doing this is to get teachers certified.”

Typically, teachers work toward accreditation by participating in a two-week class in the summer.

“The tact we’re taking in Fentress County,” Levin says, “has to do with teachers learning over a semester right along with their students. It fosters a deeper understanding than blitzkrieg types of courses. Plus there’s great leverage involved, since one certified teacher can teach physics to thousands of students over the course of his or her career.”

The program addresses, for both physics-teachers-in-training and students, a national and state priority to increase college graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM disciplines.

“Physics is at the root, the most fundamental of the sciences,” Levin says and, as Tammara Garrett, whose long-range goal is to teach high school biology, recalls, “I took a lot of notes.”

Kelly Ramey, a certified chemistry and biology teacher at Alvin C. York and Tammara’s instructor, remembers, “I got super interested when UT called. We had 40 kids who wanted to take the course at York and enrolled 24. There were also six from Clarkrange, which is a much smaller school. I went to Clarkrange myself.”

“Science is coming back to the forefront,” she says, “and I’m learning with the kids. My ultimate goal is to be certified in physics so I wanted to get involved.”

Linda Jordon, a science consultant for the Tennessee State Department of Education, recommended Fentress County Schools for the pilot program mainly because of the school’s enthusiasm for the project. The College of Arts and Sciences at UT provided significant funding from private gift endowment earnings that support K-12 outreach projects. Other extrarodinarily important team members in the venture have been Physics Department Head Soren Sorensen, department teaching assistant Erica Johnson, and the Office of Information Technology at the university.

“Physics by distance” will most likely stream into a classroom from an over-sized television screen at York Institute in the fall of 2009. Students and instructors will again hold atmospheric conversations that touch on entropy, friction, impedence, repulsion, apogee, causality and centripedal force. In such a rural part of Tennessee, economically depressed, where close to 60% of all students qualify for free lunches, it seems particularly rewarding that the intellectual gifts of learning physics are not only accessible but also capable of kinetically influencing students toward note-worthy achievement in college, career and life in general.

“It’s not an easy subject,” says Dr. Levin. “It’s a grind to learn and you learn best by doing. But with these kids, we’ve been very pleased, and we so appreciate the connection.”

As Tammara Garrett succinctly puts it, “I got to learn a lot.”

Footnote: Kelly Ramey and her team of science students, including Tammara Garrett, recently won the state of Tennessee’s Envirothon competition, sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture, which teaches students to view their environment as a dynamic, integrated system and encourages comprehensive systems management as a team.

The Clarence Brown High School Workshop: Permission to fall down, get up, find your own voice.

High school students who participate in summer workshops at UT’s Clarence Brown Theater come into the program from a wide sea of circumstance. One painfully shy. Another adrift in grief from the loss of a parent. A third, street-smart and angry, and worried about acceptance.

But for each teenager who makes the commitment, something invariably happens to change things. By the end of two weeks of voice lessons and improvs and performances, there’s a shift. The heart lightens, the world offers a new slate of possibilities, there’s a willingness to take risks that wasn’t there before.

“To begin with, there’s a lot going when you’re in your mid-teens,” says Carol Mayo-Jenkins, UT resident artist and workshop coach. “You’re trying to figure out who you are, how you fit in. You’re discovering you’re different from your parents. You’re learning to use your own voice, maybe for the first time.

“Then we get into this work, nine to four every day. It’s a lot of physical work. There are exercises and games and technique development in the morning, scenes and musical numbers to run through in the afternoon,” she says. “We set up a very positive experience. We suspend judgement. We encourage a sense of daring. So everyone is more willing to take risks. And when someone falls down, everybody supports them. We dust them off and they get right back in the game, usually with a lot of laughter.”

The Clarence Brown Theatre High School Acting Workshop, founded in 2001, enrolls a total of thirty to forty high school students each summer in two separate intensive workshops. Past participants, from Tennessee and seven other states, have worked on skills that include basic acting, improvisation, voice, movement and musical theatre technique.

“There’s no audition,” says Terry Silver-Alford, UT Theater Department faculty member and director of the program, “just an interest in performance.

“Over the past few years,” he continues, “we’ve added in a musical theater component. Students are assigned duets from Broadway musicals, receive voice coaching, and learn one or two large ensemble numbers which require singing and dancing. All these pieces are presented in a final showcase, which includes acting scenes from major American plays.”

For each student, the theater at hand is a theater of change and growth.

“You meet your coaches—like Carol and David Alley—and they’re really accomplished actors with great careers and you realize, ‘You know, they’re people too. I can do this,’” says Rachel Winfrey, a workshop participant for four years and a recent UT theater graduate. “What’s going on opens you up emotionally. And, let me say, there is some awesome socializing. You’re part of a family.”

Rachel, who has assisted in the workshops, talks about students adapting to games, to improv situations, to different ways of thinking and doing things.

“You might jump rope while delivering lines from Shakespeare,” she says. “It’s amazing. And it’s amazing to see how much it can mean.”

In a stage exercise, one young man wrote a rap song to his father who he had never known. “It came out of a big group scene where the actors stepped forward with a monologue they had each written,” says Carol. “It was extraordinary. All the monologues were stunning.

“The most surprising experiences for me are those times when this sort of unrealized ability just comes out in one of the kids. I don’t really know what talent is but I do know when a student puts something of themselves forward that is amazing. Often it’s just for the moment—something they are able to reach inside themselves—something unforgettable.”

And, says Carol, “I think when it pops loose, when it comes up in a performance, yes, I think they recognize it too.”

“These are kids from across every spectrum,” Rachel says, “and they’re pushed at the same level. They grow, they learn, they come into a light heart.”

In addition to Carol Mayo-Jenkins and Terry Silver-Alford, David Alley, another honored professional actor and UT resident artist, takes a major role in workshop coaching, as well as Jimmy Brimer who has musically directed a raft of shows at the Clarence Brown over many years of service to the university and to its theater.

“In Tennessee,” says Terry Silver-Alford, whose own daughter is a recent participant, “there’s nothing quite like these workshops.”

For further information, contact Terry via email at tsilvera@utk.edu or phone 865-974-6011. Student participants pay a fee for workshop attendance.

The UT School of Nursing: Providing essential care in worlds-away places

When a small cadre of UT nursing professors and students arrived in New Orleans six months after Katrina, they met with scores of women residents who’d soldiered on--through mildew, muck and make-do living conditions.

“They’d stayed in the city, doing whatever they had to do to survive,” says Dr. Mary Kollar, family nurse practitioner and UT faculty member. “And by the time they came to see us, they’d stretched out their medicines as long as they could or just finally run out.”

Some days the line cued up at 4:00 in the morning.

Operating out of a temporary clinic set up in the peacock section of the New Orleans Zoo, the team from UT focused on women’s exams. “They were desperate for care,” says Karen Lasater, another School of Nursing faculty member. “It was a scene of shock but the attitude was ‘let’s face ahead and go forward.’ Everyone was so thankful. We conducted about 300 exams.

“We handed out blankets and many of the women told their stories,” she says. “I remember visiting with a distinguished-looking lady standing in line whose house had been devastated. She was truly grateful to be there.”

In addition to pelvic exams, pap smears, medications, and general medical aid, women at the unit could also take advantage of eye and dental exams, offered by volunteers from Remote Area Medical, a Knoxville-based non-profit and a partner with UT. Lab results, gathered in Tennessee, would later be sent back to the Health Department in New Orleans (and to the patients themselves) for follow-up.

“These women had been going along for months without any care at all,” Karen says. “We worked from dawn to dark, straight through.”

Mary Kollar recalls the improvisational nature of providing care. “Something unexpected can happen. For example, we ran out of some things and decided to pay for them ourselves. We were reimbursed, which is good, because I was running out of money,” she laughs.

This same improvisational attitude, doing the best you can with what you have, is a hallmark of nursing outreach from UT, from villages in Ghana to the tropical landscapes of Costa Rica and Dominican Republic, a 2009 destination for a clinical team from the school.

Ghana missions began in 2001, in concert with the University of Massachusettes at Amherst (Ghana Health Missions), and continued for four straight years, providing medical care to the coastal fishing villages of Sekondi and Takoradi.

For both students and faculty on those trips, says faculty leader Karen Lasater, the word of the day was “respect.”

“The idea is to lift up local providers, to break down barriers on both sides, to get to know each other, to learn there are other ways to get the job done,” she says. “You’re wanting to respect and promote the autonomy of the healthcare providers who are there. So that’s what we did—and we developed a great rapport.”

Much of the work in Ghana centered around immunizations, gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses, tropical diseases, management of village hypertension clinics and setting up health education classes.

In the past five years, international service learning experiences, open to junior, senior and graduate level nursing students, have focused on Central America, with teams from UT assisting in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama and Belize.

Working as a faculty leader on many of these missions, Karen Lasater recalls that the team spends a lot of time with local physicians, getting to know them and how they work and think. “In Belize,” she recalls, “we had the opportunity to work with a physician from Cuba, who was there volunteering like us, pitching in.”

The numbers speak of the texture of the experience. In 2006, for example, in Costa Rica and Panama, UT provided health services for over 400 patients (including free medications), immunized over 200 infants and children, provided dental care (extractions, flouride treatments and cleanings) to 75 people, and conducted health education classes on disease prevention, proper nutrition, and management of chronic illnesses.

From another perspective, the “world’s away” aspect of UT volunteer nursing services doesn’t have to translate to literally being a world away. At a homeless shelter in Knoxville, acute problems like colds and lice, along with conditions like allergies and asthma, require the same close attention as a medical issue in Ghana.

Mary Kollar has been instrumental in providing medical services at the People’s Clinic of the Volunteer Ministry Center on Jackson Street since 2000, generally working side-by-side with students, as she did in New Orleans.

The effect on providers, cross-town or across the world, is cut from the same global, inter-cultural, bridging-of-diversity cloth.

Brad Stansberry, a graduate nursing student who helped Mary Kollar at the Ministry Center as a part of his clinical rotation, succinctly summarizes:

“It’s nice to be able to help people. Sometimes this is the last place a person can go for help.”

The Domestic Violence Clinic at UT College of Law: Quietly going about changing lives on a daily basis

There’s a split second of recognition, a flash of light, a dam bursting, a note that rockets to self.

It says: “Ohmygosh, I’m in good hands here.”

For victims of domestic violence who make connections with the Fourth Circuit Court in Knoxville to file for protective orders and meet with an assigned student lawyer from UT, this appears to be the emotional bridgework that happens in the first meeting.

“One of the first things we learn,” says Maryann Kassaee, a former UT Domestic Clinic student lawyer, “is to listen. You just have to be there, listen and stay clear.”

“I had a teenager filing for protection from the abuse of a boyfriend,” Maryann recalls. “I just kept listening. What came up was information that was really critical to her life, something I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Once she opened up, I could bring some other professionals into it.”

Knoxville attorney Donna Smith (UT College of Law ‘98), who supervises the program and teaches at the Law School, says these third year students are really stepping off into the art of lawyering when they agree to take on domestic violence cases in the Fourth Circuit Court.

“They learn how to collect evidence, where to get a police report, how to get a photograph they need, where to find criminal records of an alleged abuser,” Donna says. “And they learn to listen and to look for signs of domestic violence, like issues of power and control. Very often, we’re talking about economic abuse in addition to physical abuse. There’s just nowhere to go when the abuser controls the financial resources. So when a victim shows up and sits down with one of our assigned lawyers, they’re often telling their story for the first time.

“Our students are provisionally licensed,” she says. “They’re going up against seasoned lawyers so they know they have to work twice as hard. The client sees and feels how involved and how prepared their attorney is and their response has just been wonderful.”

For UT students (four per semester) who find themselves drawn to practicing domestic law while in school, getting deeply involved---listening, emotionally committing, presenting evidence and arguing a case--can bring up its own set of trials.

“To some degree or other, all students are afraid when they step up to address the court for the first time,” Donna says. “I tell them to view fear as a doorway. You’ve got to walk through it or you’ll never get to the other side. The good news is I’ve never had a student who died.”

The Fourth Circuit Court’s long-time presiding judge, Bill Swann (UT College of Law ’75), is a “huge proponent of the program,” Donna says.

“He never treated us as less than full-fledged lawyers,” Maryann recalls. “Everyone in the court is good to work with; all the clerks, courteous, friendly. They appreciated us.”

From the bench’s perspective, what these students are doing is “changing lives.”

“Their work is uniformly excellent,” says Judge Swann, “We’ve come to call them the ‘dream team’ because of the relationships they build with their clients, their thoroughness, and their caring attitude.”

The one advantage of students practicing law as it pertains to gaining and enforcing protective orders in domestic violence cases is the “compact nature of the law in this area,” according to Ben Barton, faculty member and head of the clinic at UT. “You can be up and running in two weeks,” he says, “and get right in there on the front line.”

“I had a good feeling that I knew what I was doing,” Maryann remembers. “In a hearing on an ex parte order of protection, there are certain things you can do and that’s it—it’s a narrow band of the law.”

Students who are enrolled in Family Law or Women and the Law can take the Domestic Violence Clinic as an additional class. The idea of a domestic violence clinic evolved informally in the 2000/2001 school year when several students approached UT professor Deseriee Kennedy about the prospect of assisting victims of domestic violence in securing orders of protection. Professor Kennedy, enthusiastic about the opportunity, recruited Donna Smith, a recent law school graduate with an established family law practice, to supervise the students. Those choosing to engage in the work are provisionally licensed and practice under the charter of the UT Legal Clinic.

“It’s a service to the community,” says Ben Barton, “and one that is very, very important. The students who pitch in have to have equal measures of sympathy and empathy when they’re digging into these cases. It’s a powerful experience.”

In addition to the assigned lawyer, there are many other agencies and programs that converge on the scene of domestic disputes and violence, not the least of which are support groups for any of the parties involved.

“It’s critical to know you’re not alone as a victim of domestic violence,” says Donna Smith, “and that holds regardless of a person’s age, regardless of whether it’s a husband-wife issue, a grandmother and a granddaughter, a woman or a man. We’ve represented the whole spectrum.”

UT Writer In Residence: From a small nook in the library, a world unfolds

According to Brian Griffin, the first UT writer in residence, you’d have to go in the card catalogue and look under “American Chemical Society” to ferret your way to the remote but beautiful writer’s space he was given—a space set aside for the year’s resident writer.

“I wrote a lot of poetry there,” he says, “received a small honorarium, and had access to the collection. I got lots of support. I wanted to return the favor.”

The Writer in Residence program began in 1998 as a UT library-based initiative to support emerging authors. When first approached by Paula Kaufman, who was dean of UT Libraries at the time, Brian was teaching creative writing at the university and readily accepted the appointment.

“I had bumped into several grad student gatherings at the University of Virginia where original works were read and I thought we had a wonderful opportunity to do that here,” Brian recalls. “The English Department got right behind it. We went ahead on a shoestring, held the first readings in the faculty lounge, and left the doors wide open so anyone who was walking by would be drawn in.”

The idea exploded in its dimensions in subsequent years, with each resident writer working with the English Department and library to stage readings by student authors, local writers, and nationally known, award-winning poets and artists invited to take part in the series.

Called “Writers in the Library,” this now long-running string of literary events has featured national poet laureate Ted Kooser, poets Charles Wright and Yusef Komunyakaa, author and essayist Elizabeth Gilbert, and actor, poet and country rocker Steve Earle. Local authors reading in the series have included Linda Parsons and Jeff Daniel Marion, Marilyn Kallet, Michael Knight, Jack Renfro, and Kevin Bradley.

“I hosted Ted Kooser,” says Marilyn Kallet, author, English professor and devoted series advocate, “I also hosted Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa a few years ago. We filled the auditorium and lots of overflow rooms. Everyone was so excited about Yusef’s presence. He did an informal presentation that was the jewel in the crown.”

The Writer in Residence program will take a year’s hiatus in the 2009-2010 academic year with fall-offs in supporting endowments, according to JoAnne Deeken, director of technical services for UT Libraries, though the reading series will again set sail in the library’s auditorium, generally with readings each month.

“The program will continue,” says Marilyn Kallet. “All of us in the creative writing program will make sure that the widest possible diversity of speakers comes to campus, the highest quality of writing in diverse genres will flourish. Our students need the contact with major American and world writers, and they will find themselves in that excellent company in the months and years ahead.”

As an example, Marilyn says she’ll be hosting Prairie Schooner editor Hilda Raz in late October. Also scheduled to visit: Dorothy Allison, 1992 National Book Award finalist for her semi-autobiographical first novel, Bastard out of Carolina.

In the program’s history, fiction writer and playwright Pamela Schoenwaldt followed Brian Griffin, serving as writer in residence for the years 2001 through 2003. In that time frame, she helped double the number of readings in the auditorium series, focusing on local writers.

“One night we had a discussion on death, spinning a dialogue around faith and reason,” she says. “No matter the subject, it’s always a wonderful partnership with the library, a chance to meet local and regional writers, and, for students, a validation of their work.”

Poet and non-fiction writer Patricia Waters served as writer in residence for 2003-2004, followed by RB Morris, poet, editor, and musician, from 2004 to 2008, an individual described by Barbara Dewey, Dean of Libraries, “as our first, and only, Writers in the Library performer to be backed up by a double bass.” The current writer in residence is Kali Meister whose writing grows out of acting and directing in theatre, performance art, and film productions.

“During the time I was there we began archiving the readings,” says RB Morris. “That was probably my major contribution. That and the fact that I also included songwriters. The song lyric is a poetic voice that has enriched western culture and has been a major ambassador of the American arts to the rest of the world.

“Knoxville has a long and rich history in both literature and music. The Writers in the Library program is a great outreach program for connecting student and university writers with local and regional writers. And, of course, it's always a powerful and often pivotal connection for student writers to be exposed first hand to internationally renowned authors. The program consistently brought all these connections together.”

JoAnne Deeken who, along with Martha Rudolph, coordinates the library-side of the reading series, says the community of Knoxville hugely benefits. “Families of the students come; there’s a lot of dialogue after the readings. We have audiences, depending on the subject matter, that include every age.”

“The best thing for me,” she says, “is the interaction between audience and presenter. I remember someone asking a writer, ‘How can you keep writing?’ and the writer said, ‘I can’t not do it.’”

And, as Marilyn Kallet says, there’s something to be said for the place itself.

“Any space where poetry and fiction have been honored consistently over the years becomes sacred space, and the library auditorium is no exception,” she says. “We have learned to gather there, in that venue, and our expectations of hearing strong new work have been raised and met. So the venue is important. A lot of creative energy and skill have found a home there.”

Considering the warp and bent and impact of the entire series, Brian Griffin says good humoredly, “I don’t think Paula Kaufman would have envisioned all this.”

The Writer in Residence program was named in honor of former UT Chancellor Jack E. Reese in 2005. Reese, who died in May 2005, was an active supporter of the UT Libraries and the local writing community.