MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College students who spent their spring break helping New Orleans recover from Hurricane Katrina will join youth from Mount Vernon’s First Presbyterian Church who assisted hurricane victims in Mississippi for a presentation about their experiences at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 25, on the Orange Carpet in The Commons at Cornell.

Twenty-two Cornell students were in Chalmette, La., just outside of New Orleans, clearing debris from storm-damaged businesses and working at a relief center distributing food and clothing to local residents.

Nine members of the church’s youth group spent their spring break in Gulfport, Miss., clearing debris from neighborhoods and distributing relief supplies.

Their joint presentation will include a question-and-answer session. Admission is free to the presentation.

MOUNT VERNON — College student Jase Jensen of Lisbon, who underwent surgery and chemotherapy to become cancer-free, will speak at the opening ceremonies Friday, May 12, for the American Cancer Society’s 4th Annual Relay For Life at Cornell College.

Jensen was entering his senior year at Coe College when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer last summer. He underwent emergency surgery to remove the cancerous testicle. When the cancer spread to his lymph nodes he underwent chemotherapy and eventually received a cancer-free diagnosis. He remained in school during his treatments, active as the student body president, homecoming king and a member of the Kohawks’ football and baseball teams. He is honorary chairman of the 2006 Linn County Relay For Life in June.

An estimated 350 people are expected to walk or run around the outdoor track at Cornell’s Ash Park from 8 p.m. Friday until 8 a.m. Saturday, May 13. Money raised by 33 teams – 20 from Cornell, eight from area schools and five from the community – will help finance cancer research, education, advocacy and patient services. The fund-raising goal is $37,000. Last year’s take was $32,000. Raising $30,000 this year would put the Cornell Relay For Life over $100,000 in its four-year history.

Survivors will be honored Friday in a special service that includes a survivors’ lap and luminaria ceremony, starting between 8:30 and 9 p.m. With the theme “History in the Making,” the 12-hour event will feature entertainment, games and educational materials focused on different eras, from prehistoric times to the future. There will be a silent auction of items from downtown Mount Vernon businesses, and the Ash Park concession stand will be open.

For more information about Cornell’s Relay For Life, to donate money or volunteer for the event, go online to www.cornellcollege.edu/lso/ and select the Relay For Life link, or call Cornell’s Civic Engagement Office, (319) 895-4003.

MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College will host guitarist Chuy Negrete performing the folk music of his native Mexico on Tuesday, May 16, at 6:30 p.m. in the Rathskeller of The Commons. Admission is free.

The son of migrant farm workers who later settled in Chicago, Negrete has become a leading musicologist and interpreter of Mexican and Chicano music. Through concerts and workshops nationwide, he takes his audience on a musical journey of his heritage. He has been called “the Chicano Woody Guthrie” by historian and radio host Studs Terkel.

Negrete is founder and director of the Mexican Cultural Institute in Chicago.

His visit is sponsored by Cornell’s Office of Intercultural Life, the Organization for Latino Awareness, the Performing Arts and Activities Council, the Lecture, Artists, Cultural Events Consortium and programs in ethnic studies, Latin American studies and sociology and anthropology.

MOUNT VERNON - Cornell College’s theatre and communications studies department has received a $3,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant to workshop and develop a new play, with work on the production occurring in Term 3 of 2006-2007.

The grant, provided through the New Plays On Campus program of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, will help fund the residency of playwright C. Denby Swanson. She will work this fall with select students under the supervision of Mark Hunter, chair of theatre and communications studies, to develop her new play, A Brief Narrative of an Extraordinary Birth of Rabbits, and potentially stage it at Cornell the following academic year.

Swanson is a graduate of Smith College and the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers. Her play The Death of a Cat received 18 nominations for local awards after its premiere in Austin, Texas. She has been commissioned twice by the Guthrie Theater to write short plays for young actors and has become a popular guest artist and teacher on the thespian festival circuit. She is on the faculty at Southwestern University.

Cornell was one of three institutions awarded $3,000 NEA grants through the Playwrights’ Center; the others were the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Puget Sound ( Wash.).

MOUNT VERNON - Ryan Taugher, a senior international relations major from Madison, Wis., has been awarded a Fulbright grant. Starting in September he will spend nine months in Turkey studying and researching the international impact of controlling the region’s water resources.

The Turkish government has started a $32 billion project to build 22 dams to control the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for agricultural and social development. The dams are limiting water resources to countries downstream, such as Syria and Iraq.

This will be Ryan’s third stint in Turkey. As a high school senior he was an exchange student, and last summer he returned to Turkey with a University of Iowa School of Engineering course. He is the 18th Cornell student to receive a Fulbright grant since 1956. He is currently on an internship at the National Defense University Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C.

MOUNT VERNON — A record 117 students are scheduled to present research findings at the 10th annual Cornell College Student Symposium on Saturday, April 29, from 9 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. in The Commons. Admission is free to the event, which is open to the public.

The symposium, which originated as a way to spark intellectual conversation and growth on campus, is one of the premier events at Cornell. This year there will be 96 presentations, as lectures of about 20 minutes apiece, as musical performances or as poster presentations offering visual displays of projects along with explanatory comments.

The lectures or performances will take place at three sessions (9 a.m., 10:45 a.m., 1:15 p.m.) in Hedges Conference Room, Harlan Dining Room, Shaw Lounge, Berlin Room, Stockholm Room and Paris Room; poster presentations will occur at two sessions (9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 2:45 p.m.) on the Orange Carpet.

Topics include pandemic influenza, Iowa’s ghost towns, nuclear waste storage methods, sleep deprivation, the music of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” and women’s body image, the media and attitudes toward beauty. Several students will present observations from their work during spring break helping hurricane victims in New Orleans.

After the symposium, Cornell’s Delta of Iowa chapter of Phi Beta Kappa will hold its annual induction ceremony at 3 p.m. in Harlan Dining Room, followed by a reception. Seventeen students have been selected for membership based on academic potential, scholarship, creativity, professional attitude and character. Phi Beta Kappa considers members from the top 15 percent of the senior class and the top 5 percent of the junior class.

Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest and most widely respected academic honorary society in the United States. There are 270 Phi Beta Kappa chapters in the United States, including seven in Iowa. Cornell’s Delta of Iowa chapter was the fourth chartered in Iowa, in 1923.

MOUNT VERNON — Two Cornell College jazz ensembles will perform Sunday, April 30, at 3 p.m. in Kimmel Theatre of Youngker Hall on the Cornell campus. Admission is free.

The 3 O’clock Big Band will feature two tunes by Duke Ellington, “Do Nothin’ Til You Hear From Me,” with sophomore vocalist Amelia Engelbert, and “The Star-crossed Lovers.” The band will close its part of the program with the burning funk of “Chicken Scratch” by Kris “El Pollo Loco” Berg.

The 5 O’clock Experimental Jazz Combo will present an eclectic set including the Superblue arrangements of “Open Sesame” and “Blue Bossa,” the modern stylings of John Mill’s “Hover-Speed” and Ed Wilson’s “Jump and Jive” and the New Orleans’ heat of “Basin Street.”

The ensembles are directed by Don Chamberlain, associate professor of music.

MOUNT VERNON — Money, lust and a woman in drag are critical elements in the classical Roman comedy “Poenulus, the Little Latin Loverboy,” to be staged by Cornell College Latin classes Sunday, April 30, at 6 p.m. and Monday, May 1, at 11:45 a.m. in front of Allee Chapel on campus. Admission is free.

In the play, by Plautus, Agorastocles is wild for his neighbor, Adelphasium. The only problem is her pimp, a possessive and lusty man named Lycus. Looney and lovesick, Agorastocles puts himself at the mercy of his devious slave, Milphio, who decides the best way to please his master and possibly win his freedom is to destroy the pimp. Milphio cunningly uses all the lures of money, lust and a woman in drag in his attempt to achieve his goal. However, two characters arrive who may change his plans: an interesting eunuch with a story to tell that may eliminate Lycus as a threat, and a puny and mysterious foreigner whose search for his daughters reveals shocking information about the relationship between Agorastocles and his beloved, Adelphasium.

The play will be performed in Latin and English. In case of rain, the performances will be moved to the Plumb-Fleming Studio Theatre, the black box theater in Armstrong Hall.

MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College will mark Mozart’s 250th birthday in a spring choral concert Sunday, April 23, at 3 p.m. in King Chapel. The choirs are under the direction of Lisa Hearne, associate professor of music. Admission is free.

The Concert Choir will perform three movements from Mozart’s “Requiem,” featuring college organist Lynda Hakken. The Chamber Singers will sing Mozart’s motet “Regina Coeli,” featuring a solo quartet: junior Sarah Brungard, soprano; junior Kara Stumpff, alto; senior Joe Okell, tenor, and freshman Matt Roberts, bass.

Works by the Chamber Singers include two spirituals, “I Been in the Storm So Long,” with senior soprano soloist Erin Prall, and “Daniel, Servant of the Lord,” with soloists Justin Gohdes, senior, and Whitney Thiessen, junior. Also included are “Two Japanese Proverbs” by Gary Kent Walth, choral conductor at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, and “The Coolin,” a movement from “Reincarnations” by American composer Samuel Barber.

The 75-voice Concert Choir will perform a major work by British composer Benjamin Britten, “Hymn to St. Cecilia,” featuring four soloists: soprano Prall, alto Stumpff, tenor Okell and bass Robert Fisher.

The concert will close with a Cajun love song, “Tender Love,” arranged by Norman Luboff, and a spiritual by New Orleans composer Moses Hogan, “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel.”

MOUNT VERNON — Indian Creek Nature Center will celebrate Earth Day weekend with the dedication of a seven-acre prairie Sunday, April 23, for Paul Christiansen, emeritus professor of biology at Cornell College who devoted his career to studying, managing, preserving and restoring the tall-grass prairie.

The dedication is from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Nature Center in Cedar Rapids, with a ceremony at 1:30 p.m. and a prairie planting from 2 to 4 p.m. Plants and shovels will be provided. There also will be light refreshments and live music.

The area to be known as the Paul Christiansen Prairie sits north of Otis Road and east of Bena Brook. The site will be marked with a large, engraved glacial boulder.

Christiansen, a Nature Center board member, retired in 1996 after 29 years at Cornell. He was born and raised on a farm in Iowa. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Iowa, doctorate at Iowa State University and taught at Humboldt (Iowa) High School before arriving at Cornell.

In the 1970s he launched a project to help more than half of Iowa’s counties re-introduce prairie along county roads. Iowa’s 19th-century landscape was abundant with prairie wildflowers and tall grasses. Aside from their natural beauty and link to Iowa’s past, prairies are critical as erosion control and a deterrent of noxious weeds – plus the native plants are easier to maintain than foliage being introduced 30 years ago along road easements. Christiansen also conducted numerous studies on state parks and prairies for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and consulted on the restoration of tall-grass prairies across the state for both public and private entities.

Cornell, the Iowa Nature Conservancy and the Department of Natural Resources join the Nature Center in hosting the prairie dedication. For directions and information about the Nature Center, go to www.indiancreeknaturecenter.org.