Campus News Briefs
Concert honors jazz generation
Jazz musician and artists George Herms and Joe McQueen will perform Friday, April 12, at 7:30 p.m. in the Taggart Student Center Auditorium at Utah State University.
The performance will be in conjunction with the exhibit “Jay DeFeo: Doctor Jazz and Works on Paper 1952-1989.”
They wanted to bring the spirit of the 1950s and ’60s to USU and create an educational as well as inspirational experience for students and the Cache Valley community, Jim Edwards curator for the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum said.
Herms is a remarkable Los Angeles-based sculptor, poet and performance artist who shared the Beat era with DeFeo, he said.
McQueen lives in Ogden and is a jazz saxophonist. McQueen has jammed with the likes of Louie Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole, Larry Smith, pianist in the Joe McQueen combo and a professor at USU said.
Other events to be held in April to honor DeFeo include Beat material exhibited in the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum, curated by USU Special Collections, and a Jazz Brunch featuring the music inspiring DeFeo, performed by USU student jazz combos was well as Larry Smith and Joe McQueen.
A panel discussion with Herms and Leah Levy, independent curator and trustee of the estate of Jay DeFeo, with Edwards as moderator will take place Saturday, at 10 a.m. in the NEH Caine Gallery.
All events are free and open to the public. For more information contact Edwards at 797-0164 or go to www.hass.usu.edu/~museum.
USU students
win SPJ awards
Utah State University journalism students swept 17 awards, including six firsts and domination in online journalism, in the annual regional Society of Professional Journalist’s Mark of Excellence Awards competition on Saturday.
The awards were presented during the Region nine annual conference in Fort Collins, Colo. The Mark of Excellence contest recognizes the best of student journalism in print, broadcasting, photography and on the Internet. Region nine includes colleges and universities in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming.
USU’s student-produced online news site, “The Hard News Café,” was named the best all-around independent online student publication, and USU student reporters won awards in all five online categories.
“We are very proud of our students’ performance in the Mark of Excellence contest this year, especially in the new online categories,” said Ted Pease, journalism and communications department head.
Leading the Aggie journalists were senior Will Bettmann, who co-authored three winning articles, and junior Leon D’Souza who won a first place in the online opinion and commentary for a series of articles on India and terrorism.
Department of English honored
The department of English at Utah State University walked away with three of the nine college awards presented by the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Jeffrey Smitten, department head, said.
Lynn Sullivan McNeil, third-year American studies/folklore graduate student, received the Research Assistant of the Year award.
For the third consecutive year the award for Humanist Researcher of the Year went to English department faculty, this time to Nancy Warren. Warren is currently at work on “God and Men of Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conflict, 1380-1600.”
Kristine Miller, assistant professor of English, received the Teacher of the Year award for the Humanities division this year.
This is the third time in four years members of the English department have been awarded HASS Teacher of the Year for the Humanities Division, Smitten said.