Libraries

On January 21 at 1:45 pm, as part of the National Day of Racial Healing 2025, the museum and WSU’s English Department will host a reading and open mic program in response to the theme of the day, “Keep on Pushing: Building Bridges to Sustainability.” Readers will include WSU Campus Civic Poets & finalists, creative writing students and faculty, and student editors of WSU creative writing publications. All students, faculty, staff, and community members are invited to bring a poem to read during the open mic portion. Poems may be original compositions or selected from the work of another author, though they should engage with the themes of the day. Before and after the program, visitors are encouraged to view current museum exhibitions, including “The Art of Food: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation” and “Your Collection: Faculty Remix”.

The Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections at WSU Libraries is holding an opening reception for an exhibit called “Against the Grain: Countercultural Eating on the Palouse, 1916-2024.” The description of the exhibit is as follows: In 1989, Pullman, Washington, was named the Lentil Capital of the World. The reason was simple: the Palouse region produced 98 percent of the lentils grown in the United States. Most were shipped to customers in Europe, Africa, and Asia, where they had been enjoyed for hundreds and even thousands of years. Lentils have deep roots in cultures worldwide, but how did they arrive in the Palouse? To answer that question, one must consider countercultural communities in the United States—vegetarians, vegans, back-to-earthers, environmentalists, activists, and pacifists who chose a diet that lay outside of the norm.