Southern Connecticut State University has been awarded the Tobacco Grant from the state Department of Public Health. As of August 25, 2015, the university is a tobacco-free campus, the first public university in Connecticut to implement such a policy. In coordination with this new policy, which will eliminate exposure to second-hand smoke at Southern and prohibits the use of all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, a multi-faceted state and community intervention was proposed, based on best practices in tobacco prevention and control. The proposed work will sustainably prevent the initiation of tobacco use and promote cessation among young adults at the university, while also building capacity for tobacco control and prevention in the Connecticut State University system.

As part of the grant, the SCSU Health and Wellness Center staff plans to train and empower anti-tobacco youth advocates (Tobacco-Free Ambassadors, or TFAs) to engage and mobilize their peers through campus community outreach, education, demonstrations, and events. The Health and Wellness Center will offer enhanced onsite cessation services for students, including a comprehensive and intensive 8-week intervention facilitated by a clinical professional trained in cessation counseling. Innovative, student-led social media campaigns will highlight social norms, common misconceptions about smokeless tobacco, and exciting events such as flash mobs, film screenings, and e-cigarette exchange events. Southern will lead a statewide coalition with Central Connecticut State University (CCSU), Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU) and Western Connecticut State University (WCSU) to build university capacity and share best practices in tobacco control and prevention. Through conferences, ongoing technical assistance and on-site consultations, Southern will coordinate state efforts for tobacco-free policies, and support other  universities in their efforts to sustain healthy communities for living and learning. As a result of the Tobacco-Free Campus Policy and the proposed programming, the university expects to see rates of tobacco use decline over the next two years as demand for cessation increases and social norms change.

Initial grant funding will allow the university to implement, evaluate, and improve ongoing and comprehensive tobacco prevention programming and collaboration to change social norms and maximize human and financial resources. The proposed statewide coalition will serve as a replicable model for other public and private universities considering tobacco-free policies and hoping to increase efficiency and effectiveness through creative collaboration.

The proposed cost of this multi-faceted state and community intervention is $235,496. Grant funding will support a part-time program coordinator, two expert consultants/trainers, four full-day conferences with partner sites, technical assistance and financial support to subcontractor partner universities, extensive training and support for staff and student workers, cessation aids, permanent signage and promotional items, supplies, and five professional conferences where project leaders will share best practices and a replicable model for tobacco prevention and control policies on campus communities. Subcontractors include CCSU, ECSU, and WCSU, as well as experts in cessation and e-cigarettes to provide specific training, support, and technical assistance to partners and student workers. SCSU Health and Wellness Center staff salaries, including the Principal Investigator and co-Principal Investigator will be paid in full by Southern as an in-kind contribution. Grant funding will cover costs associated with dozens of student-led programs, outreach, and events, including innovative e-cigarette exchange events.

English Professor Vivian Shipley, a Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor, has published two new volumes of poetry: Perennial (Negative Capability Press, 2015) and The Poet (Louisiana Literature Press, 2015). Shipley, who earned her bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees in English from the University of Kentucky and her doctorate in Victorian literature from Vanderbilt University, has taught at Southern since 1969 and has published 10 books of poetry and six chapbooks. She teaches undergraduate and graduate poetry writing workshops in the English Department.

The painting on the cover of The Poet is a portrait of Shipley’s mother- and father-in-law, Ruth and Morris Harris, who are dressed for a Halloween party. The artist, their daughter Marcia Harris, died from multiple sclerosis at age 49. Poems in this collection, says Shipley, are centered on the multiple disguises and masks that poets can wear and refer in one way or another to the act of writing poetry. “Fiction is, well, fiction,” Shipley says. “Poets seek to find truth, personal or universal, in their poetry. But, does poetry need to be literally true? Can and/or should the poet be a good liar? The difficulty of writing poetry that appears to be confessional but never really happened or didn’t happen quite that way can be very disturbing to other people—particularly family members.” In The Poet, Shipley explores different techniques to counter this problem and still write poems that sound as if the poet has had experiences she has not had. Readers who delve into the poems in The Poet can decide if Shipley really defaced Sylvia Plath’s gravestone, trekked the Inca Trail to get to Machu Picchu, hiked up Av. Du-Lachaise to visit Jim Morrison’s grave, was a surfer chick, a dominatrix or a hammer thrower. Personal poems about aging are, she admits, unfortunately true.

Shipley was raised in Kentucky, and her relatives all lived on dirt farms there. The photograph on the cover ofPerennial is of Celia Farmer, Shipley’s maternal great-great-grandmother, who lived to be 107 on one small farm or another in Pulaski County, Kentucky. Born in 1818, she died in 1925. Blind for many years, she had no teeth and was cared for at the end of her life by her daughter, Lydia Farmer Stewart, who was Shipley’s great-grandmother. Poems in Perennial, Shipley says, are centered on the persistent poverty, illness, and terror that plague the world generation after generation. The book’s first section, arranged in chronological order, begins with a poem about Rebecca Nurse, who in 1692 was hanged in Salem, Mass., for being a witch, and ends with a poem that pays tribute to the lives of 142 Christian students in Kenya who were killed by al-Shabab on April 2, 2015. Shipley says she does not believe her poems will impact constant acts of senseless brutality, but she thinks it’s important “to not look away or forget lives that have been snuffed out by mindless cruelty.” The book’s two other sections contain poems about personal loss, focusing largely on the deaths of Shipley’s parents. “A priest is blessed to be able to offer a communion wafer that provides salvation to a deeply troubled world,” Shipley says. “Poets have only their words to give. Evil in this world will not be tamed; widespread injustice will not be curbed. The poems in Perennial bear witness to the struggle of the heart, the mind, the body ensnared by powers that cannot be understood or controlled.”

A New York Times review of Shipley’s poetry says that it “preserves a uniqueness of place,” and her work has received many accolades. Her book All of Your Messages Have Been Erased (Louisiana Literature Press, 2010) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won both the 2011 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and the Sheila Motton Book Prize for Poetry from New England Poetry Club. It was also recognized as Best Creative Work by the Connecticut Press Club and was a finalist for both the Connecticut Book Prize and the Milton Kessler Poetry Prize from SUNY-Binghamton. Shipley has received many other awards and recognitions as well, including being chosen as SCSU Faculty Scholar three times and named to the University of Kentucky Hall of Distinguished Alumni.

Wellesley College has awarded Southern alumna Sarah Tortora the prestigious Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellowship, which is given to an outstanding early-career painter or sculptor, and this year provides $35,000 of unrestricted funds to support one year of unimpeded time and space to experiment, develop a body of work, and focus on future artistic goals. A solo exhibition at the Jewett Art Gallery at Wellesley College concludes the fellowship.

Tortora graduated from Southern in 2011 with a B.S. in studio art, concentration in sculpture, under the direction of Professors Jeff Slomba and Rachael Vaters-Carr. Tortora says, “Southern is where I experienced my first challenges in art-making; where I used wood and metal tools for the first time, took my first art history courses, and developed a rigorous work ethic.” After graduating, she attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, and received her M.F.A. in interdisciplinary arts in 2013. From 2013 to 2015, she returned to Southern as an adjunct faculty member in the Studio Art Department and taught various sculpture courses. During that time, she also attended artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Jentel Foundation.

Tortora describes her sculptural works, which consist primarily of wood and steel constructions, as “containing references to Modern architecture, art history, furniture, utilitarian fixtures, and mechanisms of display. They suggest performativity, or the potential for intervention, but remain amalgams in a cycle of identification and misrecognition. These works become sites for projection, as facsimiles of archetypal objects and icons, or signs to reveal the structure of their own presentation.”

For the fellowship year, she intends to focus on “expanding a series of large-scale pieces that conflate the sculptural lexicons of museum-based Modern sculpture, often nomadic in its placement, and Equestrian monuments, which are always site-specific.” Tortora’s plan is to devote the majority of her time to working in the studio, not only producing new bodies of work, but also conducting creative research and acquiring new technical skills in the facilitation of future pieces.

The Cole Fellowship is made possible by the generous bequest of Wellesley alumna Alice C. Cole, ’42. Aware of the burdens that face recent graduates of art school, Alice Cole had said that she wanted to provide “a ‘breathing space’ early in an individual’s career that will stimulate creativity and allow time to focus on career objectives, freeing the individual from concentrating on purely monetary achievements.”