Everything Nac

Stephen F. Austin State University’s Coordinated Community Response Team will host a number of free educational seminars and events beginning at 6 p.m. every Tuesday in October in recognition of Sexual Violence Awareness Month.

The events, held in the Baker Pattillo Student Center, will cover a range of topics, including bystander intervention and rape prevention, as well as a screening and discussion of “The Hunting Ground,” an award-winning documentary examining the incidence of sexual assault on college campuses.

“Dating violence and sexual assault are important topics that can’t be ignored,” said Dorothy Jackson-Tubbs, project coordinator of SFA’s Office of Violence Against Women. “Our goal at SFA is to provide education and empower our students to step in if they see something that doesn’t look right.”

Tubbs said these efforts are the result of a grant SFA received from the Department of Justice’s Office of Violence Against Women.

“Through the grant, we’ve been able to create a Coordinated Community Response Team whose goal is to improve services for victims, provide education for bystanders and increase safety for all students,” Tubbs said. “We plan to work diligently to ensure the SFA campus continues to be a safe place for students and our entire campus community.”

For more information on the seminars, as well as SFA’s Coordinated Community Response Team, please contact Tubbs at (936) 468-2133 or tubbsdj@sfasu.edu.

As she sat in the pew listening to the sermon, her ears suddenly perked up as the preacher shared an alarmingly high statistic about the number of orphans. This statistic made her mind spin with questions, thoughts and concerns.

“Having traveled abroad and seen vulnerable children situations in several countries and then beginning my studies at Stephen F. Austin State University, I was frustrated with the sermon’s information,” said Alisha Pangborn, a recent SFA graduate who studied early childhood education in the James I. Perkins College of Education.

While the preacher called for families to care for orphans, Pangborn knew, “The problem is much more complex than you take a kid, I’ll take a kid and then there will be no more orphans. The problem includes the children and families who are hurting or need support and opportunity.”

Pangborn’s experience working with orphans and children in vulnerable situations gave her a unique insight into the problem her preacher was discussing.

“I’ve been in some of those orphanages, and I know many of those ‘orphans’ don’t need adoption; they have families. Many of those families drop kids off at orphanages when things get tight and sometimes come and take them back later, sometimes not,” she said. “Also, many children who are not considered orphans are in severe need.”

Listening to the sermon gave Pangborn an idea. She began researching both the preacher’s statistics and the interpretations and stories behind them. It was while conducting that research she discovered an article by the Christian Alliance for Orphans titled “On Understanding Orphan Statistics.”

“I immediately knew I loved this organization and was thrilled to find they were looking for an intern,” Pangborn said.

She applied for an internship with the CAFO, an organization uniting more than 190 organizations and more than 650 church members to care for orphans and vulnerable children around the world.

“I wanted to be a part of the change in how we view and care for vulnerable children,” Pangborn said.

During her four-and-a-half-month internship, Pangborn worked as the applied research and best practice intern. In this role, she helped organize the CAFO Summit in Dallas that brought more than 2,000 foster and adoptive parents, orphan advocates, pastors and professionals together to explore effective foster care, adoption, family preservation and global orphan ministry. She helped coordinate invitations, literature and presenters.

“I was able to learn from some of the giants in the field of caring for vulnerable children,” Pangborn said. “All of these amazing people are affecting change for vulnerable children. Some are involved in international policymaking, some in brain research, some in day-to-day care research, but all are in one way or another focusing on vulnerable children.”

Additionally, Pangborn assisted in creating an electronic book as a support tool for the summit titled “The Changing Brain: Created to Heal.” This book is a resource used to explain the effects neuroplasticity — how the brain can change in reaction to the outside environment — has on orphans and vulnerable children.

“My SFA education gave me the research skills I needed to complete the book. It also gave me a deeper understanding and method for approaching challenging situations with children,” Pangborn said.

For Pangborn, the benefits of the internship were plentiful. She networked with leaders in the field, practiced her research skills and learned more about the issue at hand while also reaffirming her passion for orphaned and vulnerable children.

“It opened my eyes to a whole different area that I really didn’t realize existed,” Pangborn said. “Caring for vulnerable children goes far beyond their education or the social worker who might place them in foster care. There are people studying and improving our approach to care for children in ways I never imagined.”

By Kasi Dickerson, senior marketing communications specialist at Stephen F. Austin State University.

Christina Guenther and Ron Petti, faculty members in the Stephen F. Austin State University School of Music, will present the recital “Poems and Dragons” at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2, in Cole Concert Hall on the SFA campus as a feature of the SFA Friends of Music Concert Series.

Guenther, professor of flute, and Petti, professor and director of accompanying at SFA, will present a program of music by Charles Griffes, Jennifer Higdon, Eric Ewazen and Howard Buss – all American composers.

Griffes’ “Poem,” composed in 1918, is a one-movement flute concerto (to be accompanied by piano) that suggests Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” as a reference point, according to Guenther. The initial ascending rumble (in the piano) sets the scene for the flute and generates most of the piece’s melodic material, according to notes about the piece by Matthew Mugmon.

Flutist Jan Vinci co-commissioned Higdon’s “Flute Poetic” with Pola Baytelman, her colleague and Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Skidmore College, in celebration of Skidmore’s new Arthur Zankel Music Center. In the throws of composing her first opera, Higdon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, agreed to write an original first movement and an arrangement of two movements from her “String Poetic” for violin and piano, according to program notes. The work is a technical masterpiece requiring virtuosity of both players.

Pianist-composer Ewazen wrote “Sonata No. 1 for Flute and Piano” as a gift for flutist Marya Martin, with whom he had collaborated over the years in premieres, performances and recordings. He designed the three movements in the tradition of the late 19th century instrumental sonatas. The work was premiered at the 2011 National Flute Association Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, and features beautiful melodic lines as well as rhythmic drive.

Concluding the program, “Dragon Flight” by Buss is described as “a colorful and engaging work that evokes a fantasy world in which a dragon awakens and takes flight.” The audience will hear a dragon hissing and growling and the sound of soaring flight in the flute part, accompanied by a rhythmic and energetic ostinato in the piano, Guenther writes in the program notes.

Cole Concert Hall is located in the Tom and Peggy Wright Music Building, 2210 Alumni Drive.

Tickets are $8 for adults, $6 for seniors and $3 for students and youth. For tickets or more information, call the SFA Fine Arts Box Office at (936) 468-6407 or visit www.finearts.sfasu.edu.

Stephen F. Austin State University’s Stone Fort Museum will host two maker workshops in October as part of the Nacogdoches Public Library’s Big Read campaign.

The workshops blend the history of everyday carry, on display in the museum’s current “Pocket, Purse and Pack: Digging into Every Day Carry” exhibit that will run through May 2019, with the everyday carry of the post-apocalyptic future envisioned in Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, “Station Eleven.”

“Tin Can Prep Kits” will provide makers the tools and the tin to create a kit to meet their needs. Whether it is a pocket-sized tech backup or tools to survive a long walk in the woods, this workshop will help you get it together in an Altoids tin. The workshop is slated for 2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 6.

The second workshop, titled “Modern Chatelaines and Chow,” will introduce makers to one of the earliest pockets: the chatelaine. Over a side of “good eats,” participants will fashion their modern chatelaine with a Steampunk twist. This workshop is slated for 5 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 24.

Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. The goal of the program is to have all participants read the same book in order to have meaningful discussions, lectures, classes, and interactive entertainment and events to bring the community together.

Both workshops are free of charge, but space is limited. Register by Oct. 5 for the tin can workshop and Oct. 23 for the chatelaine workshop. Leave your name and email address at stonefort@sfasu.edu or (936) 468-2408.

By Emily Brown, marketing communications specialist at Stephen F. Austin State University.

A sold-out auditorium is anticipated for “An Evening with Branford Marsalis” when the College of Fine Arts at Stephen F. Austin State University presents the jazz great in an Encore Event performance at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10, in W.M. Turner Auditorium on the SFA campus.

NEA Jazz Master, Grammy Award-winning saxophonist, Tony Award nominee and Hollywood star Branford Marsalis is a true jazz legend, and tickets for the special performance began selling quickly on the first day of sales in August, said Scott Shattuck, associate dean of the College of Fine Arts and director of the CFA’s University Series and Encore Events.

“Branford Marsalis may be best known to many as leader of The Tonight Show Band, bantering with Jay Leno,” Shattuck said. “But clearly he is one of the greatest and most versatile musicians in his own right, having soloed with some of the world’s most revered symphony orchestras and pop superstars as well as fellow jazz icons.”

Corporate sponsor Elliott Electric Supply helped to make the performance possible.

“We simply could not have attracted a star of this magnitude without the support of a music lover as generous as Bill Elliott and a company as deeply involved in its home community as Elliott Electric,” Shattuck said.

One of the most revered instrumentalists of his time and leader of one of the finest jazz quartets in the world today, Marsalis is a frequent soloist with classical ensembles. His most current quartet recording is “Four MFs Playin’ Tunes.”

Growing up in a musical family in the rich environment of New Orleans, Branford took up the saxophone when he began working in local bands as a teenager. His first major jazz gig was alongside his brother, trumpet legend Wynton Marsalis, in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.

Branford formed his own group in 1986, and the Branford Marsalis Quartet has long been recognized as the standard by which other ensembles of its kind are measured.

In addition to guest turns with a legion of giants including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock and Sonny Rollins, he has excelled in duets with major pianists including his boyhood friend Harry Connick Jr.

Broadway has also welcomed Marsalis’s contributions. He provided music for stage productions starring Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Angela Bassett and Samuel L. Jackson, garnering a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination. Marsalis’s screen credits include the original music for Spike Lee’s “Mo’ Better Blues” and acting roles in “School Daze” and “Throw Momma from the Train.”

Marsalis has toured with Sting, collaborated with the Grateful Dead and the Dave Matthews Band, served as musical director of “The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno” and hosted National Public Radio’s widely syndicated “Jazz Set.”

Prior to the SFA performance, Dr. Nathan Nabb, professor of saxophone in the SFA School of Music, will present an informative talk at 7 p.m. in Griffith Gallery. The gallery is located across the hall from Turner Auditorium, which is inside the Griffith Fine Arts Building, 2222 Alumni Drive. The audience is invited back to the gallery for a post-performance reception to meet the performers and to honor the corporate sponsor.

Patrons will want to mark their calendars for another special Encore Event that features a full-on rock concert with The Purple Xperience on Friday, Nov. 30. Bringing the spirit and sounds of Prince direct from Minneapolis, The Purple Xperience is the most authentic Prince tribute show in the world. This performance is sponsored in part by Lehmann Eye Center.

Encore Event tickets are $45 for Section A seating; $36 for Section B seating; and $27 for Section C seating. Discounts are available for seniors, students, children and SFA faculty and staff members.

For more information, visit finearts.sfasu.edu, stop by the Box Office in Room 211 of the Griffith Fine Arts Building, or call (936) 468-6407 or (888) 240-ARTS.