There was laughter. There were fellowships. There were expressions of gratitude. There was the humming of a jazz tune. We had it all on August 26 at the kickoff event for SIUE Reads, our campus-wide reading project.
SIUE Reads is sponsored by the Hansen Humanities Network, made possible by a generous gift from Stephen and Julia Hansen.
At the opening event, we, the organizers, offered brief remarks, and the Hansens shared a few words about their gift.
It just so happened that we also had a special guest: my faculty mentor, Eugene B. Redmond. To pay tribute to him, I opened my remarks by humming Miles Davis’s "All Blues," a song Redmond had often hummed to open his readings.
More than 50 students attended the event. They mingled, received personalized “Welcome to SIUE Reads” notes I prepared for each of them, and picked up one of the following book selections: Ta-Nehisi Coates's Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet (2016), Jessica Nabongo's The Catch Me If You Can: One Woman's Journey to Every Country in the World (2022), Erika Engelhaupt's Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science (2021), or Joy Harden Bradford's Sisterhood Heals: The Transformative Power of Healing in Community (2023).
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