Here’s a round-up of briefs from around Southwest and Southside. Send yours for possible inclusion to news@cardinalnews.org.
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Danville Community College sets registration dates, open house
April 1 marks the first day of summer and fall registration at Danville Community College. Students may enroll in summer classes, which begin May 23, or for the fall term, which begins Aug. 22.
Financial aid packages, scholarships and other services allow most students to attend DCC with no out-of-pocket cost, the school said in a release.
Applications are currently being accepted for fall scholarships. Program-placed students can apply for scholarships at danville.edu/dccefscholarships.
DCC will be hosting a community open house event from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. April 21 at the Student Center on the DCC campus, as an opportunity for interested individuals to visit the campus and learn more about student life, academic programming, and more. Tours will be conducted every 30 minutes until 5:30 p.m.
For more information about applying and enrollment at DCC, visit danville.edu/nextsteps and fill out the interest form.
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Emory & Henry College honors two on Founders Day
Emory & Henry College celebrated its 185th Founders Day on March 24 by awarding citations to two people that gave back to their community in honor of the four founders of the college. The Alumni Association awarded the 2021 and 2020 honorees for the Distinguished Alumni Awards.
The first of the honorees is Nancy Johnson of Glade Spring. Johnson is a retired artist who served as a resident artist for nearly 20 years at the Arts Depot in Abingdon. Johnson began painting in 1989 after 17 years of nursing. Her art is a multimedia experience, Johnson’s paintings are accented with glued-on features meant to bring the art to life.
The second honoree is T. Edward Damer, a retired philosophy professor and chair of the Division of Visual and Performing Arts at Emory & Henry. Damer authored “Attacking Faulty Reasoning” while employed at Emory & Henry and continued to be named the 1988 Virginia Professor of the Year a decade later. In addition to the various teaching awards he received, Damer was awarded for his service while in the Rotary Club on four separate occasions.
In conjunction with the time-honored celebration of Founders Day, the Emory & Henry Alumni Association has chosen annual honorees to award the various Distinguished Alumni Awards. The Alumni Association presented awards to honorees selected for both 2021 and 2022 this year.
The honorees for the year 2021 are Rob Goldsmith, ’71 for the Carl and Ruth Looney Humanitarian Award; Lisa Jordan, ’84 for the Distinguished Achievement Award; Kishanna Caesar Heyward, ’08 for the A.L. Mitchell Young Alumnus of the Year Award; James Duchamp for the James A. Davis Faculty Award; and every E&H in the City Volunteer for the Fred Selfe Distinctive Service to Emory & Henry Award.
The honorees for the year 2022 are Charlie Phillips, ’60 for the Carl and Ruth Looney Humanitarian Award; Michael K. Young, ’86 for the Distinguished Achievement Award; Stephen and Jessica Curtis Callahan, ’11, ’11 for the A.L. Mitchell Young Alumni of the Year Award; Cyndi Jennings, ’91 for the Fred Selfe Distinctive Service to Emory & Henry Award; and Eric Coley, ’04 for the James A. Davis Faculty Award.
To make future nominations, view the alumni awardee acceptance speeches and see past recipients, visit www.ehc.edu/alumni/get-involved/alumni-awards
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Appalachian College of Pharmacy announce commencement speaker
The Appalachian College of Pharmacy has announced that Steven Smith, president and chief executive officer of K-VA-T Food Stores Inc., which operates Food City stores throughout a five-state area, will be its 2022 commencement speaker.
The event will be May 7.
Raised in Grundy, Smith earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from James Madison University. Throughout his 42-year career with Food City, he has served in a number of key positions, before assuming his current position as president and chief executive officer.
Smith is a former member of the Appalachian College of Pharmacy’s board of trustees.
Headquartered in Abingdon, K-VA-T Food Stores operates 130 Food City locations (including 113 pharmacies and 114 fuel/convenience stores), four Super Dollar Food Center limited assortment, and four wine and spirits stores throughout southeast Kentucky, southwest Virginia, east Tennessee, north Georgia and Alabama.
The Appalachian College of Pharmacy is the only three-year Doctor of Pharmacy program in Virginia. Founded in 2003, the college accepted its first students in 2005. It is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.
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McCrumb to speak at University of Lynchburg
Sharyn McCrumb, an award-winning Southern writer best known for her Appalachian “Ballad” novels, will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. April 14 at the University of Lynchburg.
The event, the latest in the University of Lynchburg’s Thornton Reading series, is sponsored by the Richard H. Thornton Endowment in English. Admission is free and the public is invited.
McCrumb’s work includes The New York Times bestsellers “The Ballad of Tom Dooley,” “The Ballad of Frankie Silver” and “Ghost Riders,” which also won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature from the East Tennessee Historical Society and the national Audie Award for Best Recorded Book.
Among numerous honors, McCrumb was named a “Virginia Woman of History” by the Library of Virginia and a “Woman of the Arts” by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
“Her work is beautifully and thoughtfully researched, her characters are compelling, and her stories are sad, funny, and often gripping,” said Robin Bates, an English professor who nominated McCrumb for the Thornton Reading, in a statement. “More than that, they present a side of Appalachia that I think is often not told, one that goes far beyond the hillbilly stereotype. She shows the nuanced, beautiful, and sometimes painful parts of life in the mountains without resorting to cliches.”
Bates is using “The Ballad of Frankie Silver” in her Literature and the Body class this semester. The book is based on a real murder trial from North Carolina in the 1830s.
Nina Salmon, ’93 MEd, associate professor of English and director of Lynchburg’s Senior Symposium, is using three McCrumb novels in her College Writing class. The first-year students, in groups of two or three, are reading and discussing the novels “book club” style.
For more information about the Thornton Reading series, email Jer Bryant ’03, ’10 MA, Richard H. Thornton chair and assistant professor of English, at bryant.j@lynchburg.edu.