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The Board of Trustees of Spalding University and the University community honored two distinguished individuals with deep roots in the Louisville community, who have made significant contributions in their fields of service. The recipients exemplify service, philanthropy, leadership and a dedication to the greater good: businesswoman and artist Nana Lampton received the honorary degree, Doctor of Public Service, and Mary Haynes, CEO and Administrator of Nazareth Home, was awarded Spalding’s highest honor, the Caritas Medal alumni award.

Lampton is a successful business woman and a passionate civic leader.  A native Louisvillian, she is Chairman and CEO of Hardscuffle, Inc., and its subsidiary, American Life & Accident Insurance Company of Kentucky. She works on local and national levels to advance in industry, the arts, and community development. She is also an acclaimed poet and painter. One nominator for this award described her as: “a model citizen for our community.  She has earned the enormous respect of her fellow Louisville business leaders, while also pushing the boundaries that might confine other heads of international business. She’s a wonder and a model leader, demonstrating to all, but especially to young women in our community, that many things are possible for one life.”

Caritas medalist Haynes graduated from the Bachelor of Science in Nursing program in 1977. She is currently CEO and Administrator of Nazareth Home, a long-term care facility founded by the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in 1974. Throughout her career in healthcare, Ms. Haynes has been active in education and advocacy for patients with dementia and their caregivers as well as an advocate for the nursing home-related vocations. Her leadership and expertise has been recognized by her peers. She is described as a community leader who cares deeply for nursing home residents and who has worked diligently with staff to develop Nazareth Home as the top-awarded Nursing Home in Kentucky in 2013.

Additionally, President Tori Murden McClure introduced the inaugural Compassionate Partner Award. This honorary degree is the highest honor the University can bestow upon an organization. Kosair Charities was the 2013 recipient, honored for their commitment to compassion and community-wide enrichment.

Spalding and Kosair Charities are both dedicated to compassion and community advancement. For nearly 20 years, Spalding has been a beneficiary of Kosair Charities’ investments to the community. Their support was instrumental in the development of a mobile wellness unit and Kosair Charities’ Enabling Technologies of Kentuckiana (enTECH) at Spalding’s Auerbach School of Occupational Therapy—an assistive technology resource center specializing in adaptive technologies to promote greater independence for individuals with disabilities. Most recently, Kosair Charities gifted its largest single donation to the University to enhance the health and natural science education programs in the newly dedicated Kosair Charities College of Health and Natural Sciences at Spalding.

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For nearly 20 years, Spalding has been a beneficiary of Kosair Charities’ investments to the community. Their support was instrumental in the development of a mobile wellness unit and Kosair Charities’ Enabling Technologies of Kentuckiana (enTECH) at Spalding’s Auerbach School of Occupational Therapy—an assistive technology resource center specializing in adaptive technologies to promote greater independence for individuals with disabilities. Kosair Charities’ enTECH also provides educational opportunities for current and future practitioners in the Auerbach School of Occupational Therapy at Spalding.

“Kosair Charities’ incredible gifts change for the better the future of many organizations and the lives of the children they serve. For this reason, Spalding is pleased to announce the Kosair Charities College of Health and Natural Sciences at Spalding University,” says President Tori Murden McClure. “We look forward to continuing our leadership in pediatric healthcare education and direct services in the community.”

This year, Kosair Charities gifted its largest single donation ($3.3 million) to the University. The recent donation will enhance the health and natural science education programs in the newly dedicated Kosair Charities College of Health and Natural Sciences at Spalding. It will also further pediatric healthcare education in the School of Nursing, Auerbach School of Occupational Therapy, School of Professional Psychology, and Spalding’s Applied Behavior Analysis program. Additionally, a leadership position will be established and designated with the Kosair Charities name. Furthermore, a scholarship will be awarded annually to a deserving child to attend a week-long experiential technology experience through Kosair Innovative Technology Experience (KITE). This program is operated through the Kosair Charities/enTECH partnership.

“This gift builds on the partnership between Spalding University and Kosair Charities, which has been focused on meeting the healthcare needs of the community’s children,” says Jerry Ward, Chair of the Kosair Charities Board of Directors. “We are delighted to take our collaboration with Spalding University to this new level which will support improved pediatric healthcare through excellence in education.”

The 50,000-square-foot Kosair Charities College of Health and Natural Sciences building is home to the School of Nursing, the School of Natural Science, the Auerbach School of Occupational Therapy and the Kosair Charities enTECH Center. Each year, the College provides coursework and clinical and practicum education to students who go on to practice in Louisville community and beyond.

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Kyle Jenkins at NCAA Track and Field Tournament

Spalding University sophomore thrower Kyle Jenkins placed 12th at the NCAA Division-III Track and Field Championships with a final throw of 49.53 meters.

Jenkins was one of 20 individuals selected to compete in the event that ran from May 23-25 at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Kyle was in fifth after his flight, but dropped to 12th once the second flight had concluded.

“Although Kyle didn’t place as high as he would have liked, it was a great learning experience that will benefit him in the future. We are proud of him,” said Coach Kevin Alessandro.

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Brenner graduated from Spalding’s brief-residency Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Writing program in 2010 and now teaches as a faculty mentor. The program, which is based on mentor-student relationships, strives to provide individualized curriculums that facilitate highly developed writing skills. Brenner attributes his success to the mentorship he received at Spalding.

 “I really feel the education I received at Spalding transformed my writing, both as a screenwriter and a playwright,” says Brenner. “When I’m writing, I now have a good half-dozen mentor voices in my head.”

As he disclosed his inspiration for the story, he described himself as “a big Dungeons & Dragons playing, sci-fi/fantasy geek” who has always been fascinated by mythology. He further explains, “The story for this project has been in the back of my mind for years now and when the opportunity to pitch something to Disney came up, it was one of the first things that sprung to mind.”

Although the screenplay carries the same title of the 1986 classic, Disney’s Labyrinth will not be a remake of the former. Brenner’s screenplay will be produced as an action/adventure story that features a mythical princess heroine who must enter a dangerous labyrinth to save her father. Although it is too early to divulge filming details, Brenner stated that the movie will be a live-action film, not animated.

Now that his screen play has been picked-up by Disney, Brenner reports that he feels “amazing.” In an article he authored for Script Magazine, he states that he was not prepared for success but owes a great debt to the writing professors at Spalding, “partly because they really helped me to refine my craft, but also because they were there to help me with the decision making.”

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While a doctoral candidate in psychology at Spalding, Steve Kniffley (’13) has volunteered in Senegal, founded the West Louisville Healthcare Association and received national recognition for his success while a graduate student in psychology. He also has established the Excellence in Psychology Scholarship, which will support racial ethnic minority students in the School of Professional Psychology. He talked with Spalding’s Cathi Biller, Manager of Alumni Relations, about his experience at Spalding and becoming a donor while still a student.

Spalding: What motivated you to found a scholarship at Spalding while you were still a student?

Steven Kniffley: One of the things that my grandmother, who has always played a significant role in my life, has taught me is that any place that you go, you always want to make it better than when you came.  My goal with the Excellence in Psychology scholarship is to promote excellence among minority psychology students.

I knew that there was some sort of opportunities that I wanted to leave for Spalding students.  I know that being at Spalding has been a great opportunity; I’ve learned a lot.  I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in a lot of different things that I never imagined would happen as a graduate student such as going to Africa or becoming Spalding’s first APA (American Psychological Association) Minority Fellowship recipient, and so, I felt all those things are attributed to the experiences and training that I got there. I felt obligated, or if you will, I felt like it was important for me to give back.  To make sure that there was an opportunity for other students coming in to hopefully have the same type of experience.

Spalding: Can you tell me a little bit about your experience at Spalding and where you are now?

Kniffley: The program prepares you to work out in the field and to work as a psychologist which is one of the things I’m doing now in my internship and so I feel that my training in that area is helping me to succeed with where I’m at now. It’s a very rigorous program; every year there are probably between 3,000 to 4,000 students that apply for internships and a little over half of those actually get matched .  In the doctoral program, = you have to finish an internship in order to receive your degree.  One of the good things about Spalding’s program is that we have a match rate (of students to available internships) that is higher than the national average and so whatever it is that we’re doing at the school is actually getting folks matched at internships despite how competitive the process is.

Spalding:  What is your future hope for this scholarship? 

Kniffley:  I would like to work hard to where it becomes endowed so that we reach the ($10,000) dollar mark to make that happen, and then that actually serves as a way to encourage more minority students to seek out advanced degrees in psychology.  Minority individuals are severely underrepresented in the field of psychology, especially at the graduate level. I wanted to continue to help more individuals know they can make that step in regards to getting into graduate school, which would not only do good things for Spalding, but will also do good things for the field of psychology because we would have more ethnic minority psychologists in the field.

SPALDING:  That’s wonderful.  If you could speak to other alums about this scholarship, what are some of things you would say to them?

The two key words for me are investment and opportunity.  So what I see this scholarship being, and hopefully anyone that would want to participate in contributing to the scholarship, is to know that they are investing in a quality project.  They are investing in a Spalding student that, I know and we all know, will go out and make a significant change in the community.  So any dollar that you give to this particular scholarship is going to go back to manifest in several dollars’ worth of time that will go back towards impactful change for the community.

By individuals giving to this scholarship they are giving another student an opportunity to achieve a dream. For me, getting my doctorate, that is a dream of mine.  I will be the first doctor in our family when I walk across the stage—that is—I wouldn’t have had that without having an education at Spalding.  And so, for me, this is achieving a dream and I know by having a scholarship and encouraging other people to contribute to it they are also helping another student achieve their dreams as well.

SPALDING: Did you have any really strong mentors during your time at Spalding?

SK:  Specifically at Spalding, my mentor in the Child and Adolescent and Family track at Spalding is Dr. DeDe Wohlfarth. She has been a consistent source of support since I entered the program and has continued to write letters of recommendation and has supported me throughout my entire graduate career.  I feel like I definitely owe her a lot for where I am now and for the type of professional I will be in the field.

SPALDING: Do you think you were given a chance to flourish in terms of what you were able to do because you were at a program like Spalding? 

SK:  What strikes me the most is Spalding’s commitment to a significant community impact.  So what I see our program, and the other programs on campus attempting to cultivate in their students, is this ideal of being “social change agents” so we’re not just receptacles of knowledge but we’re dispensers of it and that’s not just, “I tell you factual information,” but I’m also figuring out ways to apply it to make our communities better.

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Dr. Michelle Reiss, Chair of the School of Business at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, was elected as a member of the Board of Commissioners of the IACBE.

About the IACBE – The International Assembly for Collegiate Business Education (IACBE) was founded in 1997 and is nationally-recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). The IACBE is the leader in mission-driven and outcomes-based programmatic accreditation in business and management education for student-centered colleges and universities throughout the world.

The IACBE’s mission is to promote and recognize excellence in business education in institutions of higher education worldwide, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, through specialized accreditation of business programs. The IACBE has hundreds of member institutions and campuses and well over 900 accredited programs in the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Central America, and South America.

The IACBE’s World Headquarters are located in Lenexa, Kansas, USA, with a representative office in Paris, France.

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Festival of Contemporary Writing events will be held at the Brown Hotel (335 W. Broadway) and at Spalding’s Egan Leadership Center Lectorium (901 S. Fourth St.), as noted. Plenty of free parking is available for the campus readings. Authors may or may not read from the work listed.

11:15 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Saturday, May 18. (Brown Hotel, 16^th floor, Gallery)

• Larry Brenner (dramatic writing), Saving Throw Versus Love; Bethlehem

• Rachel Harper (fiction), Brass Ankle Blues

• Roy Hoffman (creative nonfiction), Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations

• Shane McCrae (poetry), Blood

• Kirby Gann (fiction), Ghosting

• Charlie Schulman (dramatic writing), The Fartiste; Frankenswine

5:15-6:30 p.m. Sunday, May 19. Celebration of Recently Published Books by Faculty. (Brown Hotel, 16^th floor, Gallery)

• Eric Schmiedl (playwriting), The Kardiac Kid

• Elaine Orr (fiction), A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa

• Gabriel Dean (playwriting), The Transition of Doodle Pequeño

• David-Matthew Barnes (playwriting; writing for children & young adults), Relocations; Wonderland

Introductions by Sena Jeter Naslund. Book signing to follow. Books provided by Carmichael’s Bookstore.

6:15-7:15 p.m. Monday, May 20. (ELC Lectorium)

• Lesléa Newman (writing for children and young adults), A Sweet Passover

• Rebecca Walker (creative nonfiction), Black, White, and Jewish

• Robin Lippincott (fiction), In the Meantime

• Susan Campbell Bartoletti (writing for children & young adults), Down the Rabbit Hole: The Diary of Pringle Rose, 1871

• Kathleen Driskell (poetry), Peck and Pock: A Graphic Poem

7:00-8:00 p.m. Wednesday, May 22. (ELC Lectorium)

• Sam Zalutsky (screenwriting), You Belong to Me

• Mary Clyde (fiction), Survival Rates

• K.L. Cook (fiction), Love Songs for the Quarantined

• Greg Pape (poetry), Four Swans

• Sena Jeter Naslund (fiction), Adam & Eve

5:15-6:15 p.m. Thursday, May 23. (Brown Hotel, 16^th floor, Gallery)

• Leslie Daniels (fiction), Cleaning Nabokov’s House

• Pete Duval (fiction), Rear View: Stories

• Maureen Morehead (poetry), Late August Blues: The Daylily Poems

• John Pipkin (fiction), Woodsburner

• Helena Kriel (screenwriting), Skin

6:30-7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 23. (Brown Hotel, 16^th floor, Gallery)

Featured Author. The Diana M. Raab Distinguished Writer in Residence: Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried. Welcome and introduction by Sena Jeter Naslund. Book signing to follow. Books provided by Carmichael’s Bookstore.

4:45-6:00 p.m. Friday, May 24. Celebration of Recently Published Books by Alumni. (Brown Hotel, 1^st floor, Citation)

• Chris Mattingly (’10), Scuffletown

• Sandi Hutcheson (’12), Looks Great Naked (published as Grace Adams)

• Charlotte Rains Dixon (’03), Emma Jean’s Bad Behavior

• David Harrity (’07), Making Manifest: On Faith, Creativity, and the Kingdom at Hand

• Brittany K Fonte (’07), Fighting Gravity

• Ann Eskridge (’08), The Raven

• Loreen Niewenhuis (’09), A 1,000-Mile Great Lakes Walk

3:00-4:00 p.m. Saturday, May 25. MFA Alumni Reading. Alumni read from works in progress. (ELC Lectorium)

• Barry George (’09), Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku

• Marjetta Geerling (’11), Fancy White Trash

• Dan Nowak (’07), Of a Bed Frame

• Katerina Stoykova-Klemer (’09), The Porcupine of Mind

• Terry Price (’06), Alumni Association Director

• Ellyn Lichvar (’07), MFA staff

• Gayle Hanratty (’06), MFA staff

The reading schedule may change without notice. Check the website for updated information: . For more information, call 502-873-4400 or 800-896-8941, ext. 4400, or send us an email.

Spalding’s four-semester, brief-residency MFA in Writing combines superb instruction with unparalleled flexibility. The Program offers concentrations in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, writing for children and young adults, screenwriting, and playwriting. Students begin the semester in the spring, summer, or fall with a 10-day residency in Louisville or abroad, then return home for an independent study with a faculty mentor for the rest of the semester. Students may customize the location, season, and pace of their studies. See spalding.edu/mfa for more information.

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Originally published in 1990, The Things They Carried is a collection of linked stories that follows a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. The title story and others in the collection have been widely anthologized and taught at the high school and college level. In 2005, The Things They Carried was named by the New York Times as one of the twenty best books of the last quarter century. It was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and received one of France’s highest literary awards, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. The title story received the National Magazine Award and was selected by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century.

O’Brien received the National Book Award in Fiction in 1979 for his novel Going After Cacciato. He has received lifetime achievement awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic, Esquire, Playboy, Harper’s, and numerous editions of The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. His novels have sold more than three million copies and have been translated into more than 20 languages.

The Diana M. Raab Distinguished Writer in Residence fund was established in 2011 through a gift from Raab, a 2003 alumna of the Spalding MFA in Writing program. An award-winning memoirist, essayist, and poet, Raab is the author of eight books.

O’Brien’s appearance is the headline event for Spalding’s Festival of Contemporary Writing, May 18-24. The festival is Kentucky’s largest and most prestigious spring-fall reading series. Past guest authors include Ernest J. Gaines, Yusef Komunyakaa, Pico Iyer, Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), Naomi Shihab Nye, Bobby Moresco, Heather Raffo, and many others.

The Festival of Contemporary Writing is part of Spalding’s brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program. The creative writing program offers concentrations in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, writing for children and young adults, playwriting, and screenwriting. Fall and spring semesters begin in Louisville in November and May, respectively, while a summer semester with residency abroad begins in June or July and is designed to fit teachers’ schedules.

Click here for more information,

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The public is welcome and encouraged to check out this creative and engaging collection of works. April 29 – May 31.

The works were inspired by the book sculptures of British artist, Su Blackwell. Drawing inspiration from fictional stories, memories or personal themes, current Kentucky School of Art  three-dimensional design students created their own personal narratives through paper.

Students repurposed books to serve as stage and material; each work captures an individualized handling of material and sensitivity to space and object. These miniature worlds are full of small and hidden details, which beckon the viewer to engage in close exploration

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