Officials with the University of Maine at Presque Isle and the New England Resource Center for Higher Education announced in a Friday morning press conference that the University has been awarded a major grant from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation that will allow it to develop and improve culturally responsive retention strategies for its Native American students.

The award allows the University to receive up to $750,000 over the next four years to better serve its Native American student population as well as the region’s Native American community. With 65 Native American students, the University of Maine at Presque Isle has the highest percentage of such students of all the University of Maine System campuses. The University is one of four universities in New England chosen to participate in Project Compass, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation’s multi-year initiative aimed at increasing the number of underrepresented populations graduating with four-year degrees. Project Compass is administered by the foundation’s intermediary, the New England Resource Center for Higher Education.

Acclaimed writer Cathie Pelletier is returning to her northern Maine roots with a new course that she will teach at the University of Maine at Presque Isle this spring on writers who explore northern life and living.

Pelletier will offer the course Northern Writers: A Sense of Place, which will focus on writers of New England and other northern climes as well as those whose works focus on this unique region and way of life. Open to campus and community members, this 10-week course that begins in February will explore the works of those who capture the essence of New England living and carving out a life “up north.”

Pelletier – who has written nine novels including several that examine life as lived in small Maine towns – will provide opportunities for her class to speak in person and by phone with some of the writers whose works they will be reading. While schedules still are being coordinated, Pelletier is hoping to connect her students with writers such as Suzanne Kingsbury (The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me), Howard Frank Mosher (A Stranger in the Kingdom), Ernest Hebert (author of the Darby series), Deborah Joy Corey, and Chris Bojahlian, whose book Midwives was an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

A familiar face will be stepping in to serve as the University of Maine at Presque Isle’s new softball coach. Tracy Guerrette, the Lady Owls’ basketball coach and sports information director for the University, will become the women’s softball coach effective immediately. The softball season begins Feb. 1.

Guerrette replaces Coach Mike Carlos, who coached the Owl women’s softball team the past several seasons. In her new coaching role, Guerrette will prepare the team for competitive play within the NAIA and oversee recruiting efforts.

“I know Tracy will work hard to make our Softball team competitive in the Sunrise Conference this spring,” said UMPI Athletic Director Bill Casavant.

The University of Maine at Presque Isle became a working movie set between Dec. 8 and 14 as students in Cathie Pelletier’s screenwriting class brought their script to life with the help of a Hollywood cinematographer and a cast and crew hailing from Fort Kent to Portland.

Students in the course Screenwriting and the Filmmaker’s Life, taught by award-winning writer Cathie Pelletier, had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with Zoran Popovic – the cinematographer for the 2008 film War, Inc., which stars John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Hilary Duff and Ben Kingsley. Popovic and Pelletier – who has written nine novels and had two of them turned into movies – had collaborated on a film project in the past, so when Pelletier asked Popovic this fall if he would be interested in coming to Maine and working as a director on a short film with her students, he agreed to make the trip.

Popovic’s visit and the movie project he and Pelletier oversaw helped students to get a first-hand understanding of what it takes to turn a screenplay into a movie. The students, as well as several volunteer crew members, local thespians and actors from both ends of the state, worked long days and many late nights to film all the scenes in their 20-minute-long short film, titled The Proposal.

The University of Maine at Presque Isle’s Foundation has received a generous $10,000 gift for a scholarship in Peter G. McConnell’s name. The gift was given by McConnell’s family.

McConnell and his wife, Helen O’Seep McConnell, were friends of the University of Maine at Presque Isle for many years and Helen McConnell graduated from UMPI in 1950.

“We are so pleased to be able to continue the legacy Peter McConnell established during his many years of service to Aroostook County,” President Don Zillman said. “The Peter G. McConnell Memorial Scholarship will provide deserving County students with the kind of education that Peter firmly believed in – learning in order to better serve your community.”