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Roanoke student wins IPFW writing competition

Michelle L. Keplar, of Roanoke, a freshman at Indiana-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW), is the winner of the Nineteen Eighty-Four Community Book Read and Essay Contest, sponsored by The Remnant Trust at IPFW committee.

Keplar responded to the question, "How is the society in which we live moving toward or away from the society depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four?" with her winning essay, "1984: An Everlasting Warning About Humanity."

The last paragraph of Keplar's essay graced the cover of the program at a celebration for docents and volunteers on May 5. The excerpt included this timely remark: "Orwell's dire warnings about what can happen to a society whose people relinquish too many personal rights to an overzealous government still have merit today. History has an unerring tendency to repeat itself. If we are not held accountable to the happenings of yesterday, complete with our mistakes, then we cannot hope to remedy them in the future."

The Nineteen Eighty-Four Community Book Read and Essay contest was one of several activities sponsored by The Remnant Trust at IPFW committee in partnership with the Allen County Public Libraries. It was intended to stimulate community interest in the Remnant Trust documents and to encourage the use of local and school libraries and media centers and their resources.
Other students awarded honorable mention were IPFW students Sarina M. Arens, of Churubusco, and William A. Bostain, Samantha C. Ramsey, and Phillip T. Schepp, all of Fort Wayne.

For more information about The Remnant Trust at IPFW Community Book Read and Essay Contest contact Mary Arnold Schwartz, coordinator of the IPFW Writing Center, at schwartm@ipfw.edu or 481-6893.