English teachers from across the state will be entertained and enlightened at the SDCTE Spring Conference by two prominent South Dakota speakers.
The Friday luncheon will be graced by Carol Anne Heart, executive director of the Aberdeen Area Tribal Chairman's Health Board, and the Friday dinner banquet will feature Dan O'Brien, SDCTE 2001 Author of the Year.
Heart administers programs that serve the health needs of seventeen reservations and two urban health clinics, serving approximately 200,000 Indian people.
The recent past president of the National Indian Education Association, Heart has been a keynote speaker at national conferences and an advocate for education. She has promoted parent involvement and community activation for families, schools, Indian and non-lndian organizations on a wide variety of topics.
Heart's previous experience was as a political appointee to the director of Indian Health Service (IHS), in Rockville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Her final assignment was the coordination of National American Indian Heritage Month activities in Washington, D.C. Heart holds a B.A. in psychology, with minors in zoology, history, sociology and German. She attended law school at the University of South Dakota.
Dan O'Brien
The Iowa Award for Short Fiction was presented to O'Brien for his book Eminent Domain. O'Brien's books also include Brendan Prairie, The Contract Surgeon, The Rites of Autumn: A Falconer's Journey Across the American West, and Equinox: Life, Love, and Birds of Prey. His essay "The Heart of the Wind" appeared in the 1998 edition of American Nature Writing.
Publisher's Weekly wrote about O'Brien and The Rites of Autumn: A Falconer's Journey Across the American West: "Here, he explores his lifelong romance with birds of prey. For O'Brien, falcons are an ideal 'point of entry' into the larger webs and cycles of nature.
"As the title suggests, this is also a book concerned with middle age, specifically with the author's approaching 50th birthday. O'Brien's laconic prose is well suited to this autumnal theme, and his treatment will likely appeal to many baby boomers.
"O'Brien also writes frankly of the not always pleasant burden of possessing an acute mind and imagination, of the joys and travails of daily life on the ranch and in town, of the highs and lows of an existence lived faithfully in the service of art and nature.
"After 'twenty years of working in the wind,' he has 'learned a few things.' The book contains the essence of those revelations, and most have to do with love—the love of a man for his wife (a physician in Rapid City), for his closest friends (Jim Harrison, Rick Bass, various ranching buddies), for his falcons and for the land that has nurtured him. O'Brien is one of the West's stellar talents, and this is one of his finest books."