Author to speak during Peace Week at Edison State Community College

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PIQUA – Many of the students at Edison State Community College have never been alive during a time when the United States was not at war.

In order to have the opportunity to consider the issue of peace, the college is continuing a five-year tradition of Peace Week, scheduled for Oct. 22 through Oct. 29 at the Piqua campus. This event is held in connection with the International Dayton Literary Peace Prize celebration, which annually awards prizes “recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace.”

In 2014, Edison State featured the non-fiction winner Karima Bennoune, attorney, author and college professor, for “Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism” to a standing-room only crowd at the Robinson Theater. This year the college has been able to engage the author who was runner-up for the 2014 fiction competition, Margaret Wrinkle, for her account of slave breeding in Tennessee in the 19th century, “Wash.”

“It is an appropriate time to invite Wrinkle to our college and the communities we serve so that we may examine a feature of our past, which seems to reverberate in some attitudes in the present,” Edison State faculty member Vivian Blevins said. “If as a reading and responding audience, we can leap over the fact that the novelist/presenter is a white woman, we will be able to examine the interactions, the pain and the problems of the three main characters: a slave owner, a male slave used for breeding purpose and his lover who at one time was a sex slave.”

Wrinkle will read excerpts from “Wash” and have a discussion with the audience at 10:30 a.m. Oct. 29 at the Robinson Theater on the Piqua campus. Admission is free, and the community is invited to attend.

For several weeks, Edison State students have been exploring the concept of peace in personal essays as they relate obstacles they have faced such as experiencing domestic violence, being diagnosed as dyslectic, and surviving combat, and the ways in which they have-or have not-come to peace with them. The winner and runners-up for these essays will be announced on Oct. 26.

At 10:30 a.m. on Oct.24 at the college library, readers will present excerpts from the fiction and non-fiction work of the 2018 competition, and the college library has a display of the works of these writers.

At 1:30 p.m. on that same day in Room 456, participants will view and discuss two short films: “Human Flow” and “What if You Were an Immigrant?”

Throughout the week, students, employees and community members are invited to visit the Peace Wall at the Art Gallery Tech. Lounge and inscribe their words regarding peace as well as to take selfies at that site.

For further information about the events, contact Peace Week Coordinator William Loudermilk at [email protected].

Wrinkle
https://www.dailyadvocate.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/web1_Margaret-Wrinkle-WEB.jpgWrinkle

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