Nathan Gray, recipient of the 2012 Fred Fosher Excellence in Writing Award

The craft of writing well eludes many students—and adults—but KSC senior and soon-to-be alumnus Nathan Gray found the key to excellence when he approached writing as music. “I began to think of writing a page of prose as writing a page of sheet music,” said Nathan, also a musician and songwriter. “Each word can be a note, or each sentence can be a note. I kind of made it an art game, playing with the shorts and the longs. As in music, you choose a note and then you decide upon the most effective instrument to play that note. In the same way, you choose a concept and then you choose the best word or phrase to express that idea. As soon as I did that, my writing improved. Just as it’s not very interesting to have a bunch of quarter notes in a row, you don’t want a bunch of five-word sentences in your writing. You’ve got to come up with ways to add variety and present your ideas in interesting ways.”
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The newest KSC Hall of Famers: (L-R) Meghan McLoughlin, Wilson Perez, Raymond “Lippy” De Rocher, and Michelle Mason (Debbie Higgins was unable to attend)

Though winter wasn’t particularly cooperative for the Campus’ recent Winterfest weekend, spirits were high in the Alumni Center’s Centennial Hall for the Alumni Athletic Hall of Fame ceremonies on Feb. 4th. The new Class of 2012 includes Raymond “Lippy” De Rocher ’64 (baseball), Debbie Higgins ’76 (basketball), Wilson Perez ’03 (cross country/track), Michelle Mason ’05 (soccer and lacrosse) and Meghan McLoughlin ’05 (softball).

Read all about it.

Help them get the recognition they deserve: Nominate them for the 2012 Distinguished Teacher Award.

Each year the KSC Alumni Association recognizes an outstanding faculty member, based upon the following criteria: excellence in classroom teaching, encouragement of independent thinking, rapport with students in and out of the classroom, and effective student advising. If you know a faculty member here who fits that bill, send in a nomination. For more information, and a nomination form, visit the Alumni Association’s Distinguished Teacher page.

Hurry, the deadline is  4 p.m., March 9, 2012!

Christina Anderson, an elementary education and mathematics major and first-year student in the honors program, obviously has a head for math. She’s also an accomplished novelist. Her first novel, Hardly Perfect, recently entered the quarterfinals in the Amazon Breakthrough Novelist Award Contest’s young adult/romance category.

Anderson says she wrote the novel five years ago. “However,” she claimed, “I wasn’t pleased with the way it turned out the first time around, so I scrapped it and didn’t look at it again for another two years.” For the past four years, she’s been participating in National Novel Writing Month, a competition to write a 50,000-word novel in just 30 days. In 2008, she decided to revisit and rework Hardly Perfect as part of the competition.
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Andy Soucy ’72 (right) receives the 2011 KSC Outstanding Music Alumni Award from Dr. Jim Chesebrough.

Londonderry Music Director Andy Soucy ’72 received the Music Department’s Distinguished Alumni Award for 20010–2011 at the KSC Jazz Band concert in April. This award is presented each year to an alumnus who, in the opinion of the music faculty, has distinguished themselves as a musician, music educator, or as a representative of Keene State College.

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