Contact: Bruce Conley, Associate Director of College Relations
Phone: (605) 274-5526
Fax: (605) 274-4903
www.augie.edu

July 15, 2005

Augustana Academy Reunion July 29-31

SIOUX FALLS – The 2005 Augustana Academy alumni and friends reunion will be held July 29-31 on the campus of Augustana College. Highlighting the event is the reunion/awards banquet beginning at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, July 30, in the Morrison Commons’ Ordal Dining Room.

Joanne Negstad and Ole Rolvaag (1876-1931) will be honored at the banquet.

Negstad will receive the Friend of the Academy award. She served as dean of girls at the Academy from1959-1961. She earned a bachelor of arts degree at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., and a master’s degree at the University of Minnesota. She has served as the president of Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota since 2001. She has received the Alumni Achievement award from Concordia and was honored as a Top 50 Non-Profit Leaders by the Non-Profit Times. Negstad and her husband are the parents of two children.

Rolvaag, recipient of the Distinguished Alumni award, came to the United States from Norway in 1896. He graduated from Augustana Academy in 1901 and earned his bachelor and master’s degrees at St. Olaf College. He served as professor of Norwegian language at Saint Olaf from 1906 to 1931. He authored Norwegian language textbooks and novels, essays, and poems about the Norwegian-American immigrant experience. His novels, Giants in the Earth and Peder Victorious, originally written in Norwegian, received international acclaim as accounts of immigrant pioneer life on the Dakota prairies in the 1870s. He helped found the Society of Norwegian Language and Culture in 1910 and the Norwegian-American Historical Association in 1925. The Ole Rolvaag Memorial Library at St. Olaf was named for him in 1944.

Augustana Academy, located in Canton, S.D., has been closed since 1971.

For more information about the reunion and its events please contact the Augustana Alumni Office at (605) 274-4904 or email alumni@augie.edu .