Celebrated Author Nasdijj Featured Speaker of Diversity Celebrations

April 7, 2003

Critically acclaimed author Nasdijj will be the featured speaker at Ohio Dominican University's annual Diversity Day Celebration, on Wednesday, April 30, 2003.

The 2003 Diversity Text, Nasdijj's The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams.

Nasdijj, author of The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, will lecture at 2:00 p.m. in The Little Theater on the second floor of Erskine Hall, on the University's main campus at 1216 Sunbury Road. Nasdijj will sign books immediately following the program and the bookstore in Erskine Hall will sell books. Free parking is available in the Visitors Lot between Alumni Hall and Lyman Hall, west of Sunbury Road.

Prior to the lecture there will be a luncheon at noon in the Colonial Room of Sansbury Hall. Sean Kinney, a senior majoring in education at Ohio Dominican University, will present a brief commentary about the book prior to Nasdijj's lecture. The luncheon cost is $15.00 per person. Reservations are required. For more information, contact Lynda Huey at 614.251.4610 or hueyl@ohiodominican.edu.

Although he now lives in Chapel Hill, N.C. with his wife and dog, Nasdijj (pronounced Nos-deesh) spent most of his life under very different circumstances. He was born on an Indian reservation in the southwestern United States, to a Navajo mother and Caucasian cowboy/immigrant father. When he was five, his mother died of acute alcohol poisoning, and his family continued roaming the country, working on ranches and in fields picking cotton, vegetables, fruit and tobacco. It was a transient and brutal life of hunger, chaos, disease and despair, which Nasdijj was sometimes able to escape through fishing, reading and writing in his journal.

In the 1960s, Nasdijj began working with disabled children in a summer camp and saw that he could make a contribution. He has since worked as an educator with children with fetal alcohol syndrome and other disabilities, in public schools, clinical psychiatric treatment centers and Head Start teacher-training programs.

Nasdijj began writing essays during the late 1970s. They focused on the many things that happened during his life. Along the way Nasdijj adopted a son, Tommy Nothing Fancy. Tragically, his son, who had fetal alcohol syndrome, died at the age of six. To deal with the pain, Nasdijj wrote about it. While he was living in the Florida Keys, a hurricane ruined much of his life work. The only manuscript that was saved was the one about his late adopted son. He sent the remaining manuscript to Esquire magazine and in June of 1999 the essay became the signature piece for The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams.

The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams is a collection of autobiographical essays, which beautifully and powerfully describes the tragedies of his life. Nasdijj's is a major literary voice that speaks from the jagged edges of society. Each essay reflects the views of the world in which he lived and the prejudices he struggled to overcome. All of these distinct life-altering events helped to invoke the true humanistic spirit found inside the author. For this reason, the book was chosen for the University's Diversity Day celebration.

Each year Ohio Dominican spotlights one literary work to promote diversity within the University and the Columbus community. A committee of faculty and staff carefully searches for inspiring books written from a narrative perspective. Each diversity text chosen supports the mission statement of the University, "To contemplate truth and to share the fruits of that contemplation."

Past texts include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou; Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying; Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican; and Malcolm X, among others.