Featured News & Events

• Multicultural education expert to give Sankofa Lecture, Nov. 1
  

  
  Dr. Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, who is nationally known for her teaching and scholarship in multicultural education, will give a Sankofa Lecture on Thursday, Nov. 1, at 7 p.m. in Orr Auditorium (Hull 132) on “The Black-White Test Score Gap: What We Know and What We Can Do.” Dr. Irvine is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Urban Education in Emory University’s Division of Educational Studies. She is the author of seven books, was elected to the National Academy of Education this year and has received numerous national awards for teaching, research and writing, including the Social Justice in Education Award from the American Education Research Association and the Lindsey Award for Distinguished Research in Teacher Education from the American Association of Teacher Education. The Sankofa Lecture Series is sponsored by the College of Education and Human Services.

• Novelist Kent Haruf to receive Dos Passos Prize, Nov. 1
  

  
  Award-winning novelist Kent Haruf will receive the 26th John Dos Passos Prize for Literature from Longwood University on Nov. 1 at 8 p.m. in Wygal’s Molnar Recital Hall. A dessert reception in the Haga Room will follow the ceremony, which is sponsored by the Department of English and Modern Languages (EML) and funded by the Longwood University Foundation, the Office of Academic Affairs, the Cook-Cole College of Arts and Sciences, and EML. Haruf, who lives in Salida, Colo., is the author of four novels, including the bestselling Plainsong, published in 1999, which won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award and the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. He also is the author of a sequel, Eventide, as well as The Tie That Binds, which received a Whiting Foundation Award and a special Hemingway Foundation/PEN citation, and Where You Once Belonged. Mary Carroll-Hackett, assistant professor of English; chaired both the committee and the jury for this year’s Dos Passos Prize. Other committee members were Dr. Craig Challender, professor of English, and Dr. Chene Heady, assistant professor of English, and other jurors were Greg Salyer, a former Longwood faculty member who now is director of the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands in California, and last year’s recipient, Tim Gautreaux.The Prize was recently endowed by Sharon Coulter Gibb ’63 of Flagstaff, Ariz., through a substantial gift in memory of her husband, Carson Gibb.