CHAPEL HILL - After a career spent in the investments field financing new ideas in technology, Sallie Shuping-Russell wanted to do something similar for literature.

So the former UNC-Chapel Hill English major sought the advice of some old friends in the university's creative writing program, Michael McFee and Bland Simpson. Novelist and professor Pam Durban also joined their brainstorming session earlier this year, at which they came up with the notion of funding a visiting professorship position to be held by accomplished writers.

"We all liked the idea of training writers and guaranteeing this goes on forever," Shuping-Russell said in a recent interview after she made a $666,000 gift to UNC-CH to establish a visiting authors course. The gift was announced this week.

Her money will be supplemented by a grant from a state endowment trust that will bring the full amount to $1 million.

"It's so crucial that we think about the humanities as we are expanding our science threshold," she said. "If we don't do the same thing in humanities, we risk losing sight of what makes us human beings. It's kind of that simple."

The money sets up a new writing course that will bring in half a dozen authors each semester as visiting professors. Students will study their work. And the authors will give public readings.

McFee said the course will become a model for the study of contemporary literature. It will include famous and lesser-known writers from across the genres, Shuping-Russell said.

She made the gift in honor of her mother, Margaret R. Shuping, who graduated from UNC in 1944 with a degree in journalism.

Shuping-Russell, who lives in Chapel Hill, is managing director at BlackRock, a financial management firm in New York City. She is also on the UNC Board of Trustees and on the board of the UNC Foundation Investment Fund Co. She formerly worked on private investments for Duke University.

As a result, she spent much of her career connecting venture capitalists with inventors and startup companies coming out of both UNC-CH and Duke.

"There's a necessary and important emphasis on getting science funded within the university," she said. "The idea of making sure more money gets into writing, literature is something I've been thinking about for a long time.

"When we discuss issues like stem-cell research, cloning, the genetic code -- it brings out fundamental, important questions. I fully support those scientific efforts. I also think it's critical we ask the questions we are asking, and they can be asked in a nonpolitical way through a literary program."

The new course is to start in fall 2009. It will join several privately funded creative writing programs already in place at UNC-CH.