2008-2009
Professor
of the Year Award
 Dr.
Chris Abani
Department of Creative Writing
Each year we
invite students to nominate Honors faculty for the University Honors
Program Professor of the Year. This award recognizes outstanding
faculty who participate in the Honors Program through teaching and
mentoring. Students may nominate professors with whom they’ve taken an
Honors course or worked with for undergraduate research.
For
2008-2009, we are honoring Dr. Chris Abani, Professor of Creative Writing for
his course CRWT 97H: Freshman Honors Project.
Dr. Chris Abani is
Professor of Creative Writing and the author of numerous creative works.
Professor Abani’s received his Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the
University of Southern California. His areas of specialization include Poetics
and Poetry, Creative Writing, Postcolonial Literature (African and Caribbean),
Twentieth Century Literature (British and American), Gender Studies, Jazz and
West African Music.
One student noted that
“Professor Abani helped stretch my understanding of poetry and writing to a new
level, helping me engage with my writing and my self on a deep and profound
level. He helped me to believe in what I do. Professor Abani regularly pushes
his students to consider writing and the world in a new and deeper way, whether
they are practiced writers or people who have never written a poem before in
their life. And he does so with compassion and humor that makes him an
infinitely relatable teacher as well as an incredible writer. “
Another student stated,
”Chris Abani is a teacher in the truest sense of the word. It is liberating to
have stepped into a room in which the professor breaks with the incredibly
limited, perhaps superficial, medium of standard grading to measure the growth
of the student. My own personal experiences with Abani have revealed a poet and
writer who cares about guiding students to understanding literature and its
creation, which is essentially to attempt an understanding of the human
condition. To Abani, it seems that learning is not a process of regurgitating
information in order to gain a mere letter grade, but to accomplish things
within one’s self and to gain an appreciation for the beauty of his craft and
the world which surrounds us all.”
The Honors Program thanks
Professor Abani for his passion for teaching and his commitment to student
learning.
Past UHP Professors of the
Year . . .
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