Barbara (Pezalla) Powell ’72

One day last May, Barbara Powell told her friend Carolyn Stevenson that whatever the results of her cancer checkup, she’d be playing at their band’s show at the Memorial Cup.

“No matter what they say, I’m going to play the gig,” she told Stevenson. “If it’s bad news, then I’ll need to play. And if it’s bad news, I’ll need to be there, having fun.” It was bad news. She played anyway.

And the months that followed provided an inspiring example of dignity and courage in the face of cancer, Stevenson said of her friend, who died Tuesday.

Powell, a U of R English teacher – and since 1999 its associate dean of arts – was 51.

“It sort of sounds cliché,” said dean of arts Murray Knuttila. “But she really was someone with a love of life.”

Knuttila said Powell was “a feminist in the positive sense of the word,” driven by a need to end the unequal treatment of women and also possessed of a love of teaching, of books and of knowledge.

That was significant because she believed that “education was the route to righting the wrongs of the world.”

Powell was born in Fargo, ND, and raised in adjacent Moorhead, MN. She earned a BA in English at Minnesota’s Carleton College (where she met her future husband, David), then an MA and PhD at York University.

They cam in 1984 to Regina, where she taught in the English department, receiving an “Inspiring teaching award.”

“In her life as a professor, she empowered her students by showing them the crucial connections between the world of ideas and the world outside the academy, and the way in which those ideas could be used to changed the world,” wrote Prof. Kathleen Wall, who remembers her friend as witty, a good listener and “wise” in raising her children.

Powell was also the coordinator of women’s studies, and subsequently associate dean of arts, and was a fiddler in the local bands Celtic Clutter and Outlanders. But Stevenson remember her even more for the courage and class with which she faced cancer.

Powell is survived by her husband, three children, her parents, Steve and Betty Pezalla of Moorhead, three brothers, and one sister.