U.S. Charge d'affaires opens American Corner in Astana

Chargé d'affaires Spratlen will be joined at the opening ceremony by Manas Kozybayev, Chairman of Culture Committee of the Ministry of Culture, representatives of the Akimat of Astana, and Rakhimzhan Otarbayev, Director of the National Academic Library.

The Astana American Corner, like all American Corners in Kazakhstan, is a joint venture between the U.S. Embassy and the host library. The library will provide a room for the American Corner, as well as an English-speaking American Corner coordinator who will help visitors interested in American culture. The U.S. Embassy will provide reference materials, fiction and non-fiction books, CDs, and video resources that cover a broad range of American culture and history. The American Corner will be open to the public from 10:00 to 20:00, six days a week. Its multimedia materials, books, and periodicals will be accessible to the public.

The embassy's American Corners program seeks to inform and engage audiences across Kazakhstan. Together, embassy and library staffers use corners to host many different kinds of programs that will increase understanding of the United States, such as discussions featuring guest speakers from the United States, master classes given by American musicians, movie nights showing American films, and exhibitions of American art and photography.

The U.S. Embassy is proud to open this American Corner with a photo exhibit entitled JAM Session: America's Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World. The exhibit presents fifty-five framed photographs chronicling the pioneering tours of Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and many others. The images beautifully depict the story of these Jazz Ambassadors and illustrate the different activities that characterized their tours.