Marketing and Communications

The members of the all-female Delights String Quartet may be based in Knoxville, but their individual travel itineraries span the globe … literally.

Performances have taken place in Austria, Italy, Japan, Korea, Vienna, Kansas. Kansas? Cellist Stacy Nickell Miller is from Salina, and the women toured as a group there last summer.

It’s a testament to their popularity that they’re already booked for a winter performance in Knoxville at Pellissippi State Community College. Scheduled for Dec. 11 at the Magnolia Avenue Campus, the free concert will serve as “a celebration of the fall semester and a welcoming of the holiday season,” according to Rosalyn Tillman, assistant dean of the campus. The public is invited.

In addition to cellist Miller, members of the Delights String Quartet include violist Eunsoon Lee-Corliss and violinists Ikuko Koizumi and Lisa Muci Eckhoff, the group’s founder. The quartet has performed in Knoxville previously at WDVX radio, ETPtv television, the Knoxville Museum of Art, the McClung Museum, East Tennessee Children’s Hospital and Tennessee School for the Deaf. Each of the women is a performing artist with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra as well.

Individually, the members have performed around the world. Eckhoff traveled to Austria with the Vienna Boys’ Choir and played at the Olympic Arts Festival in Korea. Koizumi, who began playing the violin at age 3, has played extensively in the country of her birth, Japan. Lee-Corliss, a native of Seoul, Korea, has toured Austria and performed in Italy’s Spoleto Festival. It’s no surprise that the group’s music has been described as “eclectic” and “nontraditional.”

The Magnolia Avenue Campus is located at 1610 Magnolia Ave. The performance begins at 11:45 a.m. in the Community Room.

For additional information, contact Tillman at rtillman@pstcc.edu or (865) 329-3100.

A representative of the group Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment, or SOCM, will speak Nov. 18 at Pellissippi State Community College about two critical issues in East Tennessee: mountaintop removal mining and green-collar jobs. The free presentation takes place at 10:45 a.m. on the Magnolia Avenue Campus.

The speaker, Ann League, has been an active supporter of SOCM for many years. Her talk is part of Pellissippi State’s Common Academic Experience, which centers on the issue of coal mining in the Southeast. The college’s 2009-2010 Common Book is Denise Giardina’s “Storming Heaven,” the story of the negative impact a coal company has on a small West Virginia community.

SOCM, originally known as Save Our Cumberland Mountains, started as a grassroots community group based primarily in poor, isolated coalfield communities in the Cumberland Mountains and on the Cumberland Plateau. The group’s membership and campaigns have expanded to Middle and West Tennessee, so the name was recently changed to correspond to the growth.

SOCM is a member-run organization that encourages civic involvement and collective action so that citizens have a greater voice in determining their future. The organization now has more than 2,000 members, says League.

“Mountaintop removal is impacting the more poverty-ridden counties in Tennessee,” she said. “It is affecting the water quality in well water in those counties. Green-collar jobs can bring environmental justice and a sustainable economy to these rural communities.”

For more information, contact the Pellissippi State’s Magnolia Avenue Campus at (865) 329-3100.