City: Festival plans announced

Following up on last year’s symposium that celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of Langston Hughes, an annual festival has been established to celebrate literature and art in Kansas.

The five-day Langston Hughes February Festival will be Feb. 19-23 at Kansas University and will include two writing conferences and a film festival.

Invited speakers include:

• Gordon Parks, a Kansas native who is nationally known as a photographer, composer and author of “The Learning Tree;”
• Paule Marshall, MacArthur Award winner and author of The Fisher King;
• and KU alumnus Robert Day, author of “The Last Cattle Drive.”

Accident: Post-cupcake tooth check puts driver in hospital

A sweet false tooth can be just as troublesome as a real tooth. Just ask a Pomona woman.

Eva Nichols, 59, lost control of a van she was driving about noon Saturday when she took out her dentures to check for chocolate after eating a cupcake, according to a Douglas County Sheriff’s report.

Nichols was driving west on U.S. Highway 56 near Worden when her van went off the road into a ditch, struck two private driveways and became airborne, the report said.

Nichols was taken by Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical to Lawrence Memorial Hospital. She was admitted to the hospital but was no longer a patient as of Monday, a spokeswoman said.

Three other people — two adults and a child — in the van were not hurt, the sheriff’s office said.

Lecture: Pulitzer Prize winner next speaker in series

Roger Wilkins, one of four Washington Post journalists who shared the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Watergate scandal, will speak next month at Kansas University.

Wilkins, now a professor at George Mason University, will speak at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 16 in Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union.

He is the second speaker in the Dole Forum lecture series, sponsored by the Dole Institute of Politics at KU.

Wilkins went to the Washington Post in 1972 as an editorial writer. He shared the Pulitzer Prize the next year with reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and cartoonist Herb Block. He later was the first black man to serve on the editorial board at the New York Times.

The speech is free and open to the public, but advance tickets will be required. Tickets are available at all KU ticket offices: the Lied Center, 864-2787; Murphy Hall, 864-3982; and SUA in the Kansas Union, 864-SHOW.