We are excited to welcome new board members to Wisconsin Humanities' board: (pictured above left to right) Danielle Hairston Green, Scott Schultz, Eloisa Gómez, Laura Damon-Moore, and Lara Karpenko.
Our board is made up of 25 hard-working volunteers who live all over the state. They each bring expertise and experience that helps to guide our work in the public humanities. We meet as a full board three times a year, with committee meetings throughout the year. New members are ordinarily elected to three-year terms at our February meeting and assume office in June.
It was a pleasure to gather this June in Sheboygan! A huge thanks to our host, board member Mary Lynne Donohue!
Please help us welcome our five new 2024 Members:
Danielle Hairston Green
Danielle Hairston Green holds a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from Prairie View A&M University, a Master’s degree in Community Psychology & Social Change, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice from Penn State University. She is the Institute Director for Human Development and Relationships with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, Co-Host for the Moth In Madison (Live Storytelling Slam), and the 2nd VP of the Madison Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, Inc. She founded Embracing ARMS, Inc., which is a nonprofit organization with a vision to engage students and empower parents to take charge of their health, education, and safety within their communities. She lives in Madison.
Scott Schultz
Scott Schulz is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, career print and broadcast journalist, and former executive director of the Wisconsin Farmers Union. He has an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in reflective storytelling. In 2001, he founded The Heartbeat Center for Writing, Literacy and the Arts and continues to serve as that nonprofit organization’s president and executive director. The organization’s mission is to use writing and the arts to help people find place on the land. One of The Heartbeat’s major projects is its Veterans Expressing Themselves project, in which veterans are helped to find their voices, healing and identity by telling their stories. Scott produces a podcast that uses veterans’ voices to help other veterans heal unseen wounds. He is the author of the book, Rural Routes and Ruts: Roaming the Roads of Rural Life, and maintains a blog, www.ruralroutes.blog. He lives on a small farm south of Osseo.
Eloisa Gómez
Eloisa Gómez is the former Director of U.W. Extension-Milwaukee County and in her retirement is a public speaker and community outreach consultant. Eloisa helped to found Comité por el Voto Latino/Latinx Voter Outreach in 2017, a committee of the League of Women Voters of Milwaukee County and continues as a volunteer. Eloisa is a poet and the co-author of the prize-winning book, Somos Latinas: Voices of Wisconsin Latina Activists. She was a writer-in-residence for Write On Door County, a non-profit organization in Fish Creek, Wisconsin whose mission is to inspire and engage writers. She lives in Milwaukee.
Laura Damon-Moore
Laura Damon-Moore is a Library Strategist and Consultant at a nonprofit organization called WiLS (Wisconsin Library Services), where she supports libraries of all kinds across the state of Wisconsin with strategic planning and other projects. She is a librarian by training and has co-authored two books on creativity and community in libraries, Incubating Creativity at Your Library (ALA Editions, 2019) and The Artist's Library: A Field Guide (Coffee House Press, 2014). Laura is the instigator of IArtLibraries, a project that spotlights the unique role of libraries in their communities' creative landscapes. She lives in Monona.
Lara Karpenko
Lara Karpenko has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame and is Professor of English at Carroll University in Waukesha WI where she also serves as the Director of the Carroll University Center for the Humanities. She is editor of the collection Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age and The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature: A Feast of Blood. Her work as Director of the Center for Humanities finds opportunities for undergraduates to share their work in public-facing forums. In this vein, she has recently founded the Journal for Undergraduate Research in the Humanities. Edited and produced by undergraduate students, JURH aims to be the flagship journal for undergraduates looking to publish academic work in humanities-based fields. She lives in Waukesha.
Learn more about our Board
We have a hardworking board of members with different life and professional experiences and who come from communities all over the state. You can learn more about our volunteer members in the About section of our website, here. Approximately half of our board membership is drawn from the academic community and half from the community at large.
