Four Women Academics Win Awards

Patricia A. Whitely, vice president for student affairs at the University of Miami, received the 2013 Scott Goodnight Award for Outstanding Performance from NASPA, Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. The award is the highest honor given by NASPA.

Dr. Whitely has served in her current post since 1997. She received her bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University, her master’s degree from the University of South Carolina, and her doctorate in higher education from the University of Miami.

Shara McCallum, professor of English at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, has been chosen by U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey to receive a 2013 Witter Bynner Fellowship. Professor McCallum received a $10,000 prize and had the opportunity to read her poetry at the Library of Congress.

Professor McCallum is the author of four books of poetry: This Strange Land (Alice James Books, 2011), Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999) and The Face of Water: New & Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2011).

Dr. McCallum is a native of Jamaica. She is a graduate of the University of Miami and holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University in New York.

Leslie Gordon, director of the Rialto Center for the Arts at Georgia State University in Atlanta, was named a Knight in the National Order of Arts and Letters by the consul general of France. The award honors those individuals who contributed significantly to the furthering of the arts in France and throughout the world.

Gordon, who has been at Georgia State since 2003, was honored for strengthening cultural relations being France and the southeastern United States.

Ivy Schweitzer, professor of English at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division for American Literature Before 1800 of the Modern Language Association. She is only the third woman to ever win this honor.

Professor Schweitzer joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1983. She is an editor of the journal Heath Anthology of American Literature and holds a Ph.D. from Brandeis University. She is the author of The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England (University of North Carolina Press, 1991) and Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).