Dust off those reading glasses! Cal Poly Pomona has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to host The Big Read in Pomona this fall.
The Big Read gives communities the opportunity to come together to read, discuss and celebrate one of 23 selections from American and world literature. The Big Read in Pomona will focus on Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird through a series of events in October and November. Last year, The Big Read in Pomona encouraged thousands to pick up Bless Me, Ultima.
“We are hopeful that Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird will be a catalyst to bring people together around the broad themes of tolerance and justice that are prevalent in the book,” said Jonnie Owens, director of community outreach for the College of Letters, Arts & Social Sciences, who will oversee the use of the grant. “As our community reads, we hope they will not only find pleasure in that reading but also enlightenment and the ability to understand and get along with each other.”
The Big Read in Pomona will launch with a kickoff event Friday, Oct. 3, at the Cal Poly Pomona Downtown Center, 300 W. Second St. in the Pomona Arts Colony. Details about upcoming events will be released later this summer.
Cal Poly Pomona is one of 208 organizations across the country hosting The Big Read events this fall and winter. As a recipient of a $17,000 Big Read grant, Cal Poly Pomona along with community leaders and partnering organizations will provide community-based reading programs. Activities include read-a-thons, book discussions, lectures, movie screenings, and performing arts events. Participating communities also receive high-quality, free-of-charge educational materials to supplement each title, including Reader’s Guides, Teacher’s Guides, and Audio Guides.
The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and Arts Midwest.
Modeled on successful city reads programs, the Big Read is meant to address the national decline in literary reading as documented in the NEA’s 2004 landmark survey Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. The survey showed that less than half the American adult population now reads literature.
To date, the NEA has given more than 500 grants to support local Big Read projects.
“Everything the NEA does we do in partnership. I am delighted to announce our 208 new partners in The Big Read. Some are new to the program, some are returning, but all of them have answered the call to action to get our country reading again,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia.
For more information on The Big Read in Pomona, visit
www.class.csupomona.edu/downtowncenter/bigread/ or www.neabigread.org
Original Article published by Polycentric
Rod Leveque, 2000 - Loves Riding and Writing
By Laurie McLaughlin, Poly Trends
His most recent race was the hardest he had ever done. “It was 55 miles through fire roads and trails in the Cleveland National Forest with approximately 11,000 feet of vertical elevation gain,” says Rod Leveque of the excruciating seven-hour trek. “To give that some context, it’s more than twice the distance of a marathon, through the wilderness, with an elevation gain equivalent to climbing the stairs of the Empire State Building 10 times over.”
Leveque competes in as many as 30 mountain-bike races a year, and last season, he won the state championship for an intermediate rider in his age group. He’s 5-foot-7 and currently weighs 145 pounds, but fewer than four years ago, he was pushing the scale at 200 pounds and hadn’t ridden his bike much since high school.
“I just decided I didn’t want to keep gaining weight, so I dusted off my 10-year-old bicycle and started riding again,” he says. “I took to it really well, and I lost more than 50 pounds.”
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Does anyone recall the Chicago Bulls’ dynasty during the 1990’s with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen when the Bulls had a strong all-around defense and six NBA championship titles to show for it? One of the reasons the imprint of the Bulls’ legacy is embossed in my mind is that it reminds me of a big part of my childhood and how I grew up watching every single game with dedication and passion. Michael Jordan became one of my top role models and a hero who represented motivation and perseverance — an example of how I wanted to live my life. I am currently president of the Men Against Violence group at Cal Poly Pomona. As a student club working within the Stop Violence Office, our group is concerned with peer education and assistance in dealing with issues of stalking, sexual assault, and dating and domestic violence. One of the areas where our group differs from the T.E.A.A.R. (The Education Against Abusive Relationships) theatre group on campus is that we focus on the men’s side of the partner violence problem. The Men Against Violence group at Cal Poly Pomona concentrates on the research that explains why males commit 98 percent of all reported sexual assaults in this country (according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics) and the fact that most rapes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows. With these problems in our society continuing to occur all around us, sometimes I find myself getting overwhelmed from all of it and, at times, am hard-pressed to strive for change. So how did I get into this field, and why do I continue to invest my time? I actually get that question more times than I can count and whether the specific answer I give makes perfect sense, it is by looking at a few levels of my background that the response becomes clear.
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Music from the Romantic era will be spotlighted when the Los Angeles Philharmonic returns to Pomona for a special community performance Wednesday, Feb. 6.
General admission tickets for the world-class concert are only $5 due to the generous sponsorships of local organizations, including Cal Poly Pomona. Tickets will be available beginning Monday, Jan. 14.
The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m., with doors opening at 6:30 p.m., at the First Baptist Church of Pomona at 601 N. Garey Ave. in Pomona.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic will stage an hour of music under the direction of conductor Ward Stare, the organization’s American Symphony Orchestra League Conducting Fellow. The American Conducting Fellows Program is a national conductor training program developed and managed by the American Symphony Orchestra League. The program supports the musical and leadership development of exceptionally talented conductors in the early stages of their professional careers.
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The Inland Empire’s economy, housing market and public safety were at the center of a roundtable discussion on June 4 among academic researchers and sponsors of Cal Poly Pomona’s Center for the Study of the Inland Empire.
Led by the center’s faculty fellows, the discussion focused on the results of a 1,000-person survey of residents in the Inland Empire. Presenters also offered a few predictions of the region’s economic and housing future.
The roundtable, held at Sheraton Suites Fairplex in Pomona, gave the center’s sponsors a first glimpse of the results of the phone survey, to which they were able to submit questions. The sponsors include: Inland Empire Utilities Agency, Majestic Reality Co., Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, San Bernardino County Sun, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Three Valleys Municipal Water District, Fairplex, the city of Pomona, Southern California Edison and the city of Upland.
In the spring of 2009, the Center will host its third annual EMPIRE symposium in which faculty fellows will present their research findings in greater depth to a larger audience.
At the roundtable, Greg Hunter, associate professor of economics, said residents are less confident about the current economy compared to a year ago and are more pessimistic than consumers in other parts of the country. Despite their current pessimism, Inland Empire residents are more optimistic about the future compared to the rest of the country.
Most of the threats to economic growth are limited to the housing and financial sectors, according to Hunter.
“Banks are lending a lot less than before. It’s at the lowest levels since 2002,” Hunter said. “Until regulators get together to restore liquidity at the home property level, you won’t see a housing rebound.”
Geography professor Michael Reibel’s presentation examined the housing market in more depth. Home values are falling as much as 28 percent in some areas, and foreclosures have more than doubled. In addition, sales volumes of existing homes are down anywhere from 13 percent to 31 percent in Southern California.
However, Reibel called the changes in the real estate market a “painful adjustment,” not a freefall. He added that the housing problems could last anywhere from six months to six years.
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