PSU events honor women's history

The Women's Studies Club will sponsor a series of events March 27-31 in honor of Women's History Month. “The theme for this year’s Women’s History Month is "Women: Builders of Communities and Dreams." According to the National Women’s History Project, the goal of the celebration is to present an expanded view of the complexity and contradiction of living a full and purposeful life.

At PSU, the observance begins on Monday, March 27, with a lecture by PSU Archivist Randy Roberts at 7 p.m. in the Special Collections and Archives of the Leonard H. Axe Library. Roberts’ lecture, "Notable Women of Southeast Kansas," will be followed by a reception.

On Tuesday, March 28, the Women's Studies Club will host a screening and discussion of the film "North Country" at 7 p.m. in Room 109 of Grubbs Hall. "North Country," starring Academy Award Winners Charlize Theron and Frances McDomand, is a fictionalized account of the first major successful sexual harassment case in the United States, Jenson vs. Eveleth Mines.

On Wednesday, March 29, the club will host a benefit concert featuring the music of Amanda Rainey, a PSU student and a popular local musician. The concert will take place at 7 p.m. in Timmons Chapel. Rainey, who spent several months in Tanzania in 2005, is performing to raise money for Godfrey's Children's Center, an orphanage in Tanzania.

The week's activities will conclude on Thursday, March 30, with a poetry reading by author Elaine Terranova at 8 p.m. in the Special Collections and Archives of the Leonard Axe Library. Terranova is visiting PSU as part of the PSU Department of English Distinguished Writers Series.

Terranova is the author of three collections of poems, "The Cult of the Right Hand," which won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; "Damages;" and "The Dog's Heart." Terranova has received a National Endowment in the Arts Fellowship, two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants, and a Robert Frost Fellowship in Poetry at Bread Loaf. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner.

The reading will be followed by a reception.

For more information, please e-mail the PSU Women's Studies Club at psuwomen@yahoo.com.

---Pitt State---