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Daniele Cunningham, a Pittsburg State University graduate student and teaching assistant, will be among the poets featured in a free public reading at 2 p.m. today in the Special Collections Room, Axe Library.
She may or may not have her special helper, Jinx, with her. Cunningham, who has a seizure disorder, credits the handsome Dalmatian with helping her to succeed in school.
“He comes from JLS Dalmatians in Lindsborg, and his parents were show dogs,” Cunningham said. “He was trained by a friend of mine, and he’s a certified service dog. He was here with me during the fall semester a lot last year, and because of Jinx I got my bachelor’s degree in English.”
She said that Jinx doesn’t sense her impending seizures, but responds when one occurs. She has had grand mal seizures, but now mainly has brief petit mal or “absence seizures.”
“When I have a petit mal seizure, I lose who I am and lose depth perception, and tend to trip,” Cunningham said. “I’m not photo-sensitive, but looking down a long hallway can trigger a seizure. With Jinx I can walk down long halls with my eyes shut.”
She’s now working on a master’s degree in English, and should get it in May. She also has a bachelor’s in sociology from PSU.
Cunningham was born in Nebraska, but didn’t stay there long.
“We moved when I was three weeks old, and I grew up in Wichita,” Cunningham said. “Then I got married, and my husband joined the U.S. Army, so we moved around more, and were in Alaska for a while. When my husband got out, we missed the military so I joined up with the U.S. Navy as a linguist.”
That was when Cunningham had her first seizure.
“It was at 7:55 a.m., March 23, 1999,” she said. “They were teaching me Korean. One doctor thought that might have something to do with me developing seizures. Apparently there is a form of epilepsy that small children get when they’re learning language.”
The Navy does not permit people with language disorders to serve aboard a ship, so Cunningham was medically retired.
“The VA put me through vocational rehabilitation and I got my sociology degree,” she said.
She first attended Kansas State University, but then came to Pittsburg because of family connections. Her husband’s mother is near, her mother is only a couple of hours away, and a niece lives in Burlington.
Daniele Cunningham, a Pittsburg State University graduate student and teaching assistant, will be among the poets featured in a free public reading at 2 p.m. today in the Special Collections Room, Axe Library.
She may or may not have her special helper, Jinx, with her. Cunningham, who has a seizure disorder, credits the handsome Dalmatian with helping her to succeed in school.
“He comes from JLS Dalmatians in Lindsborg, and his parents were show dogs,” Cunningham said. “He was trained by a friend of mine, and he’s a certified service dog. He was here with me during the fall semester a lot last year, and because of Jinx I got my bachelor’s degree in English.”
She said that Jinx doesn’t sense her impending seizures, but responds when one occurs. She has had grand mal seizures, but now mainly has brief petit mal or “absence seizures.”
“When I have a petit mal seizure, I lose who I am and lose depth perception, and tend to trip,” Cunningham said. “I’m not photo-sensitive, but looking down a long hallway can trigger a seizure. With Jinx I can walk down long halls with my eyes shut.”
She’s now working on a master’s degree in English, and should get it in May. She also has a bachelor’s in sociology from PSU.
Cunningham was born in Nebraska, but didn’t stay there long.
“We moved when I was three weeks old, and I grew up in Wichita,” Cunningham said. “Then I got married, and my husband joined the U.S. Army, so we moved around more, and were in Alaska for a while. When my husband got out, we missed the military so I joined up with the U.S. Navy as a linguist.”
That was when Cunningham had her first seizure.
“It was at 7:55 a.m., March 23, 1999,” she said. “They were teaching me Korean. One doctor thought that might have something to do with me developing seizures. Apparently there is a form of epilepsy that small children get when they’re learning language.”
The Navy does not permit people with language disorders to serve aboard a ship, so Cunningham was medically retired.
“The VA put me through vocational rehabilitation and I got my sociology degree,” she said.
She first attended Kansas State University, but then came to Pittsburg because of family connections. Her husband’s mother is near, her mother is only a couple of hours away, and a niece lives in Burlington.
It was a good move.
“Pittsburg has been very accommodating, and Jinx has been in the Mall Deli and on the golf course,” Cunningham said. “The university and the faculty is very supportive, and with the smaller classes you really get to know the faculty. It was a lot easier for me to learn calculus here. My GPA skyrocketed when I got here.”
She decided to pursue degrees in English because she knew she could do something with it, such as teach. Cunningham started taking creative writing classes because she has always loved to write.“I started writing stories when I was 4, mostly with stick figures and the one or two words I knew how to write,” she said. “I really enjoy poetry, and it’s helped me work out what I think and feel.”
She tends to write about sociology and ideas, such as the ideas of Karl Marx, Talcott Parsons and George Herbert Mead.
“Laura Lee Washburn, who teaches the poetry class, has told me that my poems can be too intellectual,” Cunningham said. “She says I should try to make it more universal.”
She has been teaching Composition I courses this fall, will teach Composition II in the spring, and would love to eventually teach full-time at PSU.
“I’ve got all these degrees, I’m teaching and I’ll be a productive member of society,” Cunningham said. “I’m hoping other people with seizure disorders will look at that and think that if I can do all this, they can do it too.”
