Tag Archives: Clinton School of Public Service

Clinton School Team Continues Work on the Delta Visual Arts Show

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Clinton-School-of-Public-Service-LogoA University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service student team-based project is continuing work on the Delta Visual Arts Show this weekend.

Started eight years ago by Clinton School students, the Newport Downtown Revitalization and Improvement Volunteer Effort (D.R.I.V.E.) and the Newport Economic Development Commission (NEDC), the Delta Visual Arts Show featured 13 local artists in its first year.

Now in its eighth year, The Delta Visual Arts Show will take place this Saturday, February 27th, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. in downtown Newport, Ark., and will feature more than 180 artists from around the Delta.

Over the past eight years, multiple teams and projects have continued and expanded work in Newport and the surrounding area, including the creation of an alumni database, the study of Newport’s Blue Bridge, and the coordination of the first Delta Visual Arts Show.

This year, a Clinton School team will be helping with logistics during the Delta Visual Arts Show and will develop a fundraising plan to create a visual arts center in downtown Newport, continuing the collaboration started by the first team in 2008.

Students participating this year are Stacy Cox (Little Rock, Ark.), Zachary Glembin (Milwaukee, Wis.), Beau Papan (Little Rock, Ark.), and Keith Preciados (Miami, Fla.).

For more information on the show, visit www.newportaredc.org or call (870) 523-1009.

Today at noon at the Clinton School – A conversation about the upcoming Ark Rep productionof AN ILIAD

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Arkansas Repertory Theatre producing artistic director, Bob Hupp, will host a conversation with Joe Graves, star of the upcoming one-man show, “An Iliad.” This production adapts Homer’s Trojan War epic into a compelling monologue that captures both the heroism and horror of warfare, and answers the question: “What has really changed since the Trojan War?”

This production makes the western world’s oldest extant work of literature not only intelligible, but immediate, relevant and eerily fascinating—as if a storyteller were telling the oldest story in the book and making you believe it is being told for the very first time. Gods and goddesses, weak-tendoned heroes and the face that launched a thousand ships…it’s all just another (incredibly engrossing) yarn in this one-man adaptation, developed at the Sundance Theatre Institute.

Graves has appeared at Arkansas Rep in many productions including RED, OF MICE AND MEN, ALL MY SONS and MY FAIR LADY.

“The Good Story: Inspiring Leadership” is focus of Clinton School program this evening

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uacs hafreyLeigh Hafrey, author and a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has worked in professional ethics for over two decades, with a focus on ethical leadership, teaching college courses at Harvard Business School and MIT and consulting for private organizations around the world. For 17 years, along with his wife, Sandra Naddaff, Hafrey was a co-Master of Mather House, one of the 12 residential complexes in Harvard College.

Hafrey is a sought after expert on the relationship between storytelling and inspiring leadership.  He has been featured at conferences all over the world discussing the connection between leadership and the ability to tell a good story.  As he told The Power of Storytelling in 2015:

Storytelling supplies a narrative logic to events past, present, and future. Presentations by definition work with the principles of storytelling: plot, place, character, conflict and resolution.  Some people do it better than others, and those individuals reach leadership positions in part because of their skill as storytellers. Think Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, Muhammad Yunus and Vaclav Havel.

In his most recent book, War Stories: Fighting, Competing, Imagining, Leading, Hafrey covers the arc of military American self-perception on the screen, in print, and in public conversation over the past 20 years.

Little Rock Look Back – Abraham Lincoln

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Abraham_Lincoln_November_1863On February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky.

Lincoln never visited Arkansas. In the 1860 election, he barely registered on the Arkansas election map. Arkansas counties went strongly for Southern Democratic candidate John Breckinridge.  John Bell, the Constitutional Union/Whig candidate ran strongly in Pulaski County and a scattering of other counties.  Neither Lincoln nor Northern Democratic candidate Stephen Douglas carried a county in Arkansas.  In 1864, though Arkansas was officially under control of the Union forces, the state had not been readmitted. Therefore no Arkansans voted for Lincoln that year.

As President, Lincoln did correspond with several Arkansans.  It is said that the polite written exchanges he had with former Mayors C. P. Bertrand and Gordon Peay were helpful in maintaining a fairly peaceful occupation of Little Rock by federal forces.

In the listing of Presidential Streets of Little Rock, Lincoln is omitted.  On first blush, this might seem to be intentional to skip the name of the President who oversaw the “occupation.”  However, if that were the case, then surely Johnson would have been left out as well since he was President during the final years of the federal military occupation.  In fact, there once was a Lincoln Street. A portion of what is now Cantrell/Highway 10 was named for Lincoln. It predated the other Presidential streets.  At the time the other streets were laid out, Lincoln was skipped because a street already bore the name.

Over time, Highway 10 had been given multiple names for various sections: Lincoln, Q, and Cantrell. In the 1930s, these names were consolidated into Cantrell which was the longest section. The name Lincoln was dropped. There were very few addresses on Lincoln, most of it was railroad property.  The viaduct connecting Highway 10 with LaHarpe still bears the name of Lincoln Avenue.

In 2008, Sam Waterston appeared at the Clinton School of Public Service to kick off the Abraham Lincoln Sesquicentennial celebration activities. The official launch was supposed to be elsewhere but was cancelled due to inclement weather. So it happened in Little Rock as Waterston appeared in a program reading letters and writings from throughout Lincoln’s lifetime.  In 1994, Waterstson had received a Tony Award nomination for starring in the Lincoln Center revival of Abe Lincoln in Illinois.

Tonight at the Clinton School – Devery Anderson discusses the 1955 murder of Emmett Till

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Emmett Till bookThis evening at 6pm at the Clinton School, Devery Anderson discusses his book on the murder of Emmett Till. A book signing will follow.

Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement. Like no other event in modern history, the death of Emmett Till provoked people all over the United States to seek social change.

For six decades the Till story has continued to haunt the South as the lingering injustice of Till’s murder and the aftermath altered many lives. Fifty years after the murder, renewed interest in the case led the Justice Department to open an investigation into identifying and possibly prosecuting accomplices of the two men originally tried. Between 2004 and 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted the first real probe into the killing and turned up important information that had been lost for decades.

This book will stand as the definitive work on Emmett Till for years to come. Incorporating much new information, the book demonstrates how the Emmett Till murder exemplifies the Jim Crow South at its nadir. The author accessed a wealth of new evidence. Anderson has made a dozen trips to Mississippi and Chicago to conduct research and interview witnesses and reporters who covered the trial. In Emmett Till Anderson corrects the historical record and presents this critical saga in its entirety.

Tonight at the Clinton School – Jeremy Haft speaks about Unmade in China

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uacs haft bookUnmade in China by Jeremy Haft, Thursday, February 11 at 6pm.

Jeremy Haft, author and adjunct professor at Georgetown University who lectures in both the Walsh School of Foreign Service and the McDonough School of Business, has spent two decades starting and building companies in China across sectors of the economy. In his book Unmade in China: The Hidden Truth about China’s Economic Miracle, Haft explores the hidden world of China’s intricate supply chains and tells the story of systemic risk in Chinese manufacturing and what this means for the United States.

If you look carefully at how things are actually made in China – from shirts to toys, apple juice to oil rigs – you see a reality that contradicts every widely-held notion about the world’s so-called economic powerhouse. From the inside looking out, China is not a manufacturing juggernaut. It’s a Lilliputian. Nor is it a killer of American jobs. It’s a huge job creator. Rising China is importing goods from America in such volume that millions of U.S. jobs are sustained through Chinese trade and investment.

In Unmade in China, entrepreneur and Georgetown University business professor Jeremy Haft lifts the lid on the hidden world of China’s intricate supply chains. Informed by years of experience building new companies in China, Haft’s unique, insider’s view reveals a startling picture of an economy which struggles to make baby formula safely, much less a nuclear power plant. Using firm-level data and recent case studies, Unmade in China tells the story of systemic risk in Chinese manufacturing and why this is both really bad and really good news for America.

He has also authored other books covering China’s economy, including All the Tea in China: How to Buy, Sell, and Make Money on the Mainland, which presents best practices for importing, exporting, and doing business in China.

2016 Arkansas Literary Festival dates and lineup announced

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ALF 2016_textPrestigious award-winners, screenwriters, comedians, an expert witness, artists, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet are among the diverse roster of presenters who will be providing sessions at the thirteenth annual Arkansas Literary Festival, April 14-17, 2016. The Central Arkansas Library System’s Main Library campus and many other Little Rock venues are the sites for a stimulating mix of sessions, panels, special events, performances, workshops, presentations, opportunities to meet authors, book sales, and book signings. Most events are free and open to the public.
     The Arkansas Literary Festival, the premier gathering of readers and writers in Arkansas, will include more than 80 presenters including featured authors from approximately 24 different states and guests hailing from Canada, England, Russia, and Singapore. Each year, several of the attending authors have not visited Little Rock, Arkansas, or even the South.
     Presenters come from a wide range of backgrounds including: journalist, documentary filmmaker, economist, editor, microbiologist, national bank examiner, essayist, photographer, sports reporter, psychological examiner, musician, actress, reporter, and professor. One is co-producing Keanu Reeves’ new television show and writing an adaptation of his own book for Warner Bros. and Bradley Cooper.
     Special events for adults during the Festival include a cocktail reception with the authors, a tour of the Governor’s Mansion gardens with a wine and cheese reception, an escape room, and Readers’ Map of Arkansas launch party. Panels and sessions include genres and topics such as literary fiction, barbecue, Monopoly, female rocket scientists, travel, graphic novels, science fiction, classic literature, and a story told in playing cards.
     Children’s special events include a session by Nikki Grimes, activity hour, concert by the Kinders, and the play How the Camel Got His Hump. based on Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. Festival sessions for children will take place at both the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library and Learning Center, 4800 10th Street, and the Youth Services Department at the Main Library, 100 Rock Street. Special events for teens include North Little Rock High School Readers Theater, a teen poetry competition, and a panel with three authors of books for young adults.
     Through the Writers In The Schools (WITS) initiative, the Festival will provide presentations by several authors for central Arkansas elementary, middle, and senior high schools and area colleges.
     Author! Author!, a cocktail reception with the authors, will be Friday, April 15, at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 in advance and $40 at the door, and go on sale at ArkansasLiteraryFestival.org beginning Monday, March 15.
     This year’s Festival authors have won an impressive number and variety of distinguished awards and fellowships including: Pulitzer Prize, James Beard Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Hugo Award, Coretta Scott King Award, Will Eisner Comic Industry Award, National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree, Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, Dashiell Hammett Prize, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Houghton Mifflen Literary Fellowship, Arkansas Arts Council Fellowship.
     The work of this year’s Festival authors has been featured in notable publications including: New York Times, Details, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Forbes, the Paris Review, theHuffington Post, Women’s Health, Gourmet Magazine, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, the Daily Telegraph UK, VICE, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic, Slate, Time, Popular Science, Salon, the Best American Travel Writing, Outside Magazine, Esquire, USA Today, Reader’s Digest, Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories, Penthouse, the Nation, Best American Poetry, the Washington Post, Town & Country, the Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, GQ, Sports Illustrated, and Vogue
     The Literary Festival is presented by the Central Arkansas Library System. Sponsors include Arkansas Humanities Council, Friends of Central Arkansas Library System (FOCAL), Clinton Presidential Center, Fred K. Darragh Jr. Foundation, KUAR FM 89.1, ProSmartPrinting.com, Rebsamen Fund, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Arkansas Times, Gibbs Elementary School, Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language, MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History, Museum of Discovery, Otter Creek Elementary School, UALR Department of English, Windstream, Arkansas Library Association, Christ Episcopal Church, East Harding Construction, Hampton Inn, Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center, Henderson State University, Hendrix College Project Pericles Program, University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, Witt Stephens Jr. Central Arkansas Nature Center, Greater Little Rock Council of Garden Clubs, Capital Hotel, City of Little Rock, Et Alia Press, Consulate General of Israel to the Southwest, Literacy Action of Central Arkansas, Mayor Mark Stodola, Mollie Savage Memorial/CALS, North Little Rock High School, Plum Street Publishers, Inc., Pyramid Art Books & Custom Framing/Hearne Fine Art, Sibling Rivalry Press, Stickyz Rock ‘N’ Roll Chicken Shack, UALR Department of Rhetoric and Writing, and Whole Hog. The Arkansas Literary Festival is supported in part by funds from the Arkansas Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
     The Festival’s mission is to encourage the development of a more literate populace. A group of dedicated volunteers assists Festival Coordinator Brad Mooy with planning the Festival. Committee chairs include Kevin Brockmeier, Talent Committee; Susan Santa Cruz, Festival Guides; and Amy Bradley-Hole, Moderators.
     Visit the Festival Facebook and Twitter pages to get the latest news about the Festival. For more information about the 2016 Arkansas Literary Festival, visit ArkansasLiteraryFestival.org, or contact Brad Mooy at bmooy@cals.org or 918-3098. For information on volunteering at the Festival, contact Angela Delaney at adelaney@cals.org or 918-3095.