SWOCC release – Coos Bay, OR – The Anthropology & Sociology Department at Southwestern Oregon Community College is excited to bring Tim Brookes, Founder of the Endangered Languages Project to the Coos campus for an engaging event. Join us Thursday, November 10, 2022 at 6:30 pm, in Eden Hall (1988 Newmark Ave., Coos Bay) for his talk “Scripts in Wood: Preserving Writing Traditions Around the World”. Be sure to come early to enjoy the exhibit of wood carvings of endangered scripts that will be on display. Tim Brookes is the retired Director of the Professional Writing Program at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, and the author of 17 books and numerous articles. He founded the Endangered Alphabets Project in 2010 with his first exhibition of carvings in indigenous and minority scripts. Since 2010, the Endangered Alphabets have been seen all over the world, and Brookes has spoken about the cultural importance of writing at more than 150 colleges, universities, libraries, museums, and galleries including Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress. He has worked with a wide range of cultures to create games and educational materials for teaching indigenous scripts, and he is the author of Endangered Alphabets, The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, and Endangered Alphabets Word Search Puzzles. Brookes has worked with indigenous and marginalized communities all over the world to help preserve and teach writing scripts often overwhelmed by a larger cultural group. He brings with him a traveling exhibit of wood carvings highlighting these scripts to better illustrate the importance of indigenously-created writing to a culture. The presentation is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Dr. Dana L. Pertermann, Professor of Anthropology & Sociology at Southwestern at 541-888-7129 or dana.pertermann@socc.edu. To learn more about the Endangered Languages Project visit Brookes’ website.
