Author: Liam Otten

Martin Luther King, Jr.August 28 marks the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, one of the most famous and stirring addresses in U.S. history. In commemoration, the International Writers Center (IWC) in Arts & Sciences will host a public roundtable with St. Louis scholars and civil rights activists. The event also includes a video presentation of King’s entire, 15-minute address.

Illustration from a Hans Christian Andersen story.What is “children’s literature?” As we pause between the perfect, all-ages storms of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and the upcoming Lord of the Rings: Return of the King film adaptation, the answer seems less clear than ever. In the current issue of Belle Lettres, a bi-monthly publication of Washington University’s International Writers Center in Arts & Sciences, a culture critic and a director of teacher education explain that the genre, always hard to define, remains poorly understood and frequently underestimated.

Philip TidwellArchitecture junior Philip Tidwell has won the 2003 Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence. Tidwell’s essay was selected from a field of 130 entries by students representing 31 countries and 81 undergraduate architecture programs on six continents.

Brief artist bios and synopsis.

La Bottine Souriante, “the best band in the world!”Edison Theatre will celebrate its 31st season of exuberant dance, rich musical traditions and classic and cutting-edge theatre with the 2003-04 OVATIONS! Series. Highlights include performances by Julia Sweeney — best known as Saturday Night Live’s nerdy, androgynous Pat — and Un-Cabaret, the L.A.-based alternative comedy troupe, along with a special, one-night-only concert teaming avant-garde icons Philip Glass and Terry Riley with that rowdy postmodern ensemble, Bang on a Can All-Stars.

More than two-dozen scholars and veterans from around the country will remember the United States’ so-called “forgotten war” with “The Coldest War in the Cold War: The Blood and Politics of the Korean Conflict, 1950-1953.” The three-day conference, which takes place May 8-10, is sponsored by Washington University’s International Writers Center (IWC) in Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the Missouri Historical Society. Events will include lectures, film screenings and panel discussions on such topics as the origins and impact of the war, the experience of minority soldiers and the larger framework of the Cold War in America.

Photo by Joe AngelesFashion Show May 4Art in Motion, the 74th annual School of Art Fashion Show, will take to the catwalk at 8 p.m. Sunday, May 4, at Saint Louis Galleria. The fully choreographed, Paris-style extravaganza features dozens of professional and volunteer models wearing more than 100 outfits created by the School of Art’s 11 senior and nine junior fashion design majors.

Charles Mee’s *Big Love*Classical drama collides with modern-day excess in Charles Mee’s Big Love, a fiercely extravagant adaptation of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Maidens that The New York Times describes as “an MGM musical in Technicolor, a circus and, believe it, a Greek tragedy.”

All three may involve the same gene; the finding “may provide insight into a variety of conditions,” says lead reasearcher Jeffrey H. Miner.

A still from *Having a Ball*, one of three circus-themed e-cards by Kristine Ng.For the estimated 7 to10 million blind and visually impaired Americans, the Internet has proven to be the most powerful — and most empowering — tool since Braille. Widely available software programs such as JAWS for Windows and Windows-Eyes can read aloud online newspapers and magazines and other previously inaccessible materials. Yet as bandwidth and memory improve, businesses have increasingly sought to drive customers to glitzy, graphics-heavy Web sites that are more difficult, if not impossible, for blind users to navigate. Thanks to a group of senior design students at Washington University in St. Louis, blind and visually impaired Web users can now experience some of the Internet’s increasingly expansive potential. The 23 students — design, illustration and advertising majors in the School of Art — have created some of the first Web sites showcasing new accessibility components of Macromedia Flash MX, the increasingly popular authoring tool for Web interfaces, interactive video, Web-based games, streaming music and other multimedia content.