Join the new academic tradition known as the Summer Reading Program.  Students, faculty, staff, and alumni are reading:

The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse.

If you would like to participate in an alumni-only book discussion group in Bloomington, Chicago or Washington DC, please register or contact your area Alumni Regional President directly.

RSVP for the campus book discussion group on Friday, August 20, 6-8 p.m.

Wednesday, September 3rd the author will be discussing his book at the President’s Convocation at 11 a.m. at Westbrook Auditorium in Presser Hall, IWU.

Anna Deters ’05 won the 2012 international quarterly Eighteenth-Century Fiction Best Graduate Essay contest with her article “‘Glorious Perverseness’: Pride and Domestic Heroism in Richardson’s Novels.” The article appeared in the Fall 2013 edition. In May, she successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation in English literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

Jonathan Charak ’05 spent 2.5 years in Australia with Zurich Insurance (a total of 9 years with the company). He will be a speaker at the upcoming Casualty Actuarial Society web meeting on autonomous vehicles.

The class of 2005 had 67 donors for All In!

My Only Wife, the debut novel by Jac Jemc ’05 previously shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, has won the Paula Anderson Book Award. The award, for which Jac will receive $1000, is granted for the best work of literary fiction published by a small or independent press. She has also published a new story in the online literary magazine Bodega, and her first full-length collection of stories, A Different Bed Every Time, is due out in October 2014.

This past December, Wayne Messmer, ’72, Jaime Rukstales ’98, Kris Sturgell ’99, and Carolyn (Franz) Berger ’05, performed with the Anthony Kawalkowski Orchestra in a holiday show, “The Love and Peace of Christmas.”

Ashley Locke, English alumna and archivist at the University of Chicago libraries, shared her insights on library science, library studies programs and her work as an archivist on March 28, 2014. Her presentation was titled Careers in Library Science, and took place in Room 202, State Farm Hall.