This week, our guests on Fine Artists at Five are Will Russell, Eric Machan Howd & Katharyn Howd Machan (Tuesday), Sandra Steingraber (Wednesday), Christine Kitano (Thursday), and John White (Friday).
Join us at 5PM for 15-20 minutes to celebrate faculty artistry. https://ithaca.zoom.us/j/489986662?pwd=QUZDL1BXeHRDUHkwVkwraW92dkEzUT09
Fine Artists at Five is hosted by the Center for Faculty Excellence.
Will Russell is a Grammy award winning recording engineer and producer. He has been in the business for 40 years and owns Electric Wilburland recording studio, located in an old church just south of Ithaca. He has worked with all kind of folks including Rusted Root, Madder Rose, The Samples, The Horse Flies, The Sim Redmond Band, Big Leg Emma, Donna The Buffalo, Martin Simpson, The Burns Sisters, Donal Clancy, Joe Crookston, and Mamadou Diabate. He records all styles of music, from classical and folk to heavy metal, and does music for film, ads, and radio. Check out the Wilburland web site at www.wilburland.com
Eric Machan Howd entered Ithaca College as a Music Education major in 1986 and exited as an English major in 1990. He spent seventeen years as an award-winning Director of Instructional Design and Academic Technologies with Cornell University, Binghamton University, and the greater State University of New York system, all while teaching part-time with Ithaca College, Broome Community College, Tompkins Cortland Community College, SUNY Cortland, and Empire State College. Eric is also a pipe organist, pianist, and choir director and has worked for almost forty years as a church musician. His poetry has appeared in such publications as (selected): Nimrod, Yankee Magazine, River City,ellipses, and The Healing Muse. He is the inaugural recipient of the Milton Kessler Poetry Prize (Harpur Palate Magazine, 2001) and in 2018 he received the Switchback Poetry Award from the University of San Francisco for his poem, “Mycology.” In 2019, he was invited as a guest poet and lecturer to a Slovenian/American conference on poetry and poetics in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and afterward his essay, “A Non-Binary Approach to the Arts: the Continuum of Word and Song,” was translated and published by Poiesis Press (Slovenia, 2019). He is currently working on a collection of poetry entitled “The Ghosts of Aokigahara” which explores the voices of this haunted forest at the base of Mt. Fuji. Eric is an Assistant Professor of Professional and Technical Writing in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College and has been teaching at the College since 1999.
Katharyn Howd Machan, author of 39 collections of poetry (most recently, just last month, A Slow Bottle of Wine, winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Competition) has lived in Ithaca, New York, since 1975 and, now as a full professor, has taught Writing at Ithaca College since 1977. After many years of coordinating the Ithaca Community Poets and directing the national Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops, Inc., she was selected to be Tompkins County’s first poet laureate. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, textbooks, and stage productions, and she has edited three thematic anthologies, most recently, with Split Oak Press, a tribute collection celebrating the inspiration of Adrienne Rich.
Biologist, author, and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber, writes about climate change, ecology, and the links between human health and the environment. Her highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment was the first to bring together data on toxic releases with data from U.S. cancer registries and was adapted for the screen in 2010. Called “a poet with a knife” by Sojourner magazine, Steingraber has received many honors and awards for her work as a science writer. She has been named a Woman of the Year by Ms. Magazine, a Person of the Year by Treehugger, and one of 25 “Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” by the Utne Reader. She is the recipient of the biennial Rachel Carson Leadership Award and the Jenifer Altman Foundation’s Altman Award for “the inspiring and poetic use of science to elucidate the causes of cancer.”
Christine Katano was born in Los Angeles, CA. Her mother is a first-generation immigrant from Korea, and her father is nisei (second-generation) Japanese American. Christine earned an MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) from Syracuse University and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Texas Tech University. She is an assistant professor at Ithaca College where she teaches creative writing, poetry, and Asian American literature. She is the author of the poetry collections Sky Country (BOA Editions) and Birds of Paradise (Lynx House).
John W. White is a professional pianist specializing in diversity and is equally at home in the worlds of jazz, classical, and popular music. Highlights of his performing experience include: duo and small group collaborations with jazz vocalist and free improviser Rhiannon; appearances with jazz vocalist Kim Nazarian (of the New York Voices) and jazz instrumentalists performers Wycliffe Gordon, Tony Baker, and Paul Hanson; workshop accompaniment for Dr. Barbara Baker (choral director and scholar of Black Gospel music); accompaniment for and free-improvisation collaboration with choreographer Jeanne Goddard; and frequent freelance appearances with numerous musicians in the upstate New York region spanning numerous vernacular styles (jazz, funk, R&B, soul, latin, rock). Recently John concluded a 16-year tenure as the Music Director and Organist for St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Ithaca, NY. Currently he sings bass with the Ithaca-based Bel Lago Chorale.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20200412192134967