Guest Speakers

Each fall the English Department, with the Student Activities Commission, sponsors a performance by the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express in the Umble Center on campus. The daytime performance is for area high school students. The evening performance is for GC students and the public. In Fall 2000 the plays were Twelfth Night and Othello. On October 9, 2001, the play will be Comedy of Errors. The S.S.E. is a troupe of young professional actors whose style of production is faithful to what we know about play production in Shakespeare's day.

In October 2000 Nick Lindsay gave the annual S. A. Yoder Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the English Department. A native of Edisto Island, South Carolina, and the son of famous American poet Vachel Lindsay, Nick was poet-in-residence for the department since 1969 before retiring in 2000. At the time of the lecture, Pinchpenny Press also released Magnificent Storm, Lindsay's collected poems.

Janet Kauffman visited English classes in November, bringing her creative flair to classes in Women in Literature and Advanced Writing: Personal Essay. Kauffman is known throughout the U.S. for her quirky, innovative short fiction, as in Places in the World a Woman Could Walk. Her novel Collaborators is about a bizarre mother-daughter relationship in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Janet is a retired famrmer, environmental activist and professor at Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti.

Julia Kasdorf, poet from Penn State University, spoke to Mennonite Literature class in January about her two books of poems, Sleeping Preacher and Eve's Striptease. An alum of Goshen College and frequent visitor, Julia will teach a one-week intensive course in poetry-writing during the first week of Spring Semester in 2002. Pre-requisite: Any other college-level course in creative writing.

Jean Janzen, of Fresno, California, spoke in chapel in late March about her poems that are set to music in The Hymnal. She also gave a public reading and met with Mennonite Literature class, which was studying her work. Jean is the author of two volumes published by Good Books: Snake in the Parsonage and Tasting the Dust.

Jeff Gundy, of Bluffton College, accompanied Jean and gave a joint reading of his own poems with her. Also an alum of Goshen College, Jeff has most recently published Rhapsody with Dark Matter, his third volume of poems. He is also well known for his A Community of Memory, which was the first book published in the creative nonfiction series by the University of Illinois Press.

In May, Jack Ridl, of Hope College, worked with students in Prof. Todd Davis' poetry-writing class and gave a public reading of his poetry.