Taylor and Farish honored for humanities achievements

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At this year’s Annual Dinner, New Hampshire Humanities presented the Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities Award to Steve Taylor and the Creative Achievement in the Humanities Award to Terry Farish. Steve Taylor, founding director of this organization, exemplifies so much of what makes New Hampshire special – his love of the land, his knowledge of agricultural history and how it shaped our landscape and culture, and his service to the state as Commissioner of Agriculture for a quarter of a century. He has led a storied career as a farmer, journalist, and longtime public official, while remaining an active partner with his sons in the family dairy and maple farm in Meriden. He continues to be one of our most popular Humanities to Go presenters, with talks on the impact of cows and sheep on New Hampshire’s economy and landscape, to histories of grange halls, one-room schoolhouses, agricultural fairs, poor houses, and roads. Over and over listeners call him a true, irreplaceable “New Hampshire treasure.”

Terry Farish, former Connections program manager, is an award-winning poet and an author of children’s picture books and young adult novels, many of them influenced by her early work with the Red Cross in Vietnam. Perhaps one of Terry Farish’s greatest gifts is the ability to gently coax and nurture words and images from those who don’t know how to tell their stories – or believe that their stories even matter. In addition to leading the Connections program, last year Terry conceived of “A Year of New Voices,” a program in which ELL students and professional writers worked together and presented their poems and stories at public readings. Writing gave refugees the chance to heal from unspeakable horrors, and immigrants a way to adjust to a new home and a new language. This fall, Terry left her post with us to devote herself to her writing life and other projects.

Congratulations, Steve and Terry!