Professors Round Out Academic Year with Prizes

Cecil Giscombe has received the 2010 Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society. The award will be presented next month at the American Literature Association Conference, held in San Francisco. The award is named in honor of Stephen Henderson, a prominent critic of African American poetry and theorist of the Black Arts Movement, who taught at Morehouse College and Howard University. Previous recipients include Charles Johnson, Eugene Redmond, Marilyn Nelson, Al Young, and Nathaniel Mackey.

Anne-Lise François was awarded the René Wellek Prize at this year’s annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association.  The prize is, along with the Harry Levin prize with which it annually alternates, this country’s most prestigious book award in the discipline of comparative literature.  Anne-Lise won the prize for her book Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience, which explores works that summon up what she calls the uncountable or unrecountable in a provocation to trends in literary criticism that seek to leave no facet of a work unanalyzed.

Please join us in congratulating these important intellectual achievements.