2008 Ohio Heritage Fellowship Recipients

Performing Arts

KATIE LAUR, a bluegrass musician from Cincinnati, was born into a musical family that migrated to Detroit from the hills of Tennessee.  Her music has taken her from working on the original "Prairie Home Companion" radio show to Russia and to the Kennedy Center.  Locally Katie Laur has a very popular radio show on WNKU called "Music from the Hills of Home" on Sundays.  She also writes a monthly column for CityBeat.  She learned guitar form Junior McIntyre and has had a long and interesting career in Bluegrass Music.  She continues to work in Cincinnati to arrange shows and performances to showcase artists of a variety of styles in a variety of venues.

Community Leadership

HOWARD AND JUDY SACKS are recipients of this year's second Ohio Heritage Fellowship for Community Leadership.   They have dedicated their lives to the traditional arts and have shared their knowledge to document, preserve and present those arts to a wide audience. Howard Sacks, a sociology professor and director of the Rural Life Center of Kenyon College, and Judy Sacks, an affiliated scholar in Kenyon's American Studies department, are lifelong collaborators, folk music scholars, performers (Howard on guitar, Judy on mandolin), co-authors of the award-winning book Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem and producers of the 1985 album Seems Like Romance to Me: Traditional Fiddle Tunes from Ohio. Fixtures at Kenyon College since 1975, Howard and Judy Sacks directed the Gambier Folk Festival for more than 15 years and were deeply involved with the National Folk Festival for several years. They continued that involvement when Cityfolk brought the National Folk Festival to Dayton for three years (1996-1998), with Howard serving as main stage manager, and as Cityfolk launched the annual Cityfolk Festival in 1999. Howard Sacks was selected in 1994 as Kenyon College's first recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professorship.

Their ongoing educational and community projects about traditional foodways are models for small town and agrarian cultures.

Community Leadership

FAITH PATTERSON is a longtime community leader and arts activist from Yellow Springs.  She is the driving force behind the annual blues and jazz festival held each fall at the Antioch College Amphitheater and in the college's Kelly Hall. She was a founding members of African American Cross Cultural Works (AACW), a non-profit volunteer organization formed in 1991 to sustain the efforts of the African-American Cultural Week, a community initiative to improve cross-cultural understanding that began as an Antioch Student's senior project.   The Blues Fest, the AACW's main vehicle for its work, was first staged in 1997 and has presented dozens of local and regional acts as well as such well-known national performers as Erykah Badu, Deborah Coleman, Mulgrew Miller, Eric Bibb, Guy Davis and comedian Dave Chappelle, whose father, the late Bill Chappelle, was a co-founder with Patterson of the Blues Fest.   

[top]