| Best-Selling Author and FSU Faculty Member To Deliver Convocation Address
Professor Carole Boston Weatherford
Fayetteville, NC (BlackNews.com) -- Fayetteville State University (FSU) will kick off the 144th academic year with Fall Convocation. The event is scheduled for Tuesday, September 21, at 2:00 p.m. in the Felton J. Capel Arena. The public is invited to attend.
Keynote speaker for the event will be New York Times best-selling author and FSU English Professor Carole Boston Weatherford. Weatherford has written 40 books of poetry, nonfiction and children's literature. She composed her first poem in first grade and dictated the verse to her mother on the ride home from school. Her father, a high school printing teacher, printed a few of her early poems on the press in his classroom. So at the age of eight, long before the dawn of desktop computer, Weatherford had the thrill of seeing her work in print. Today, she mines the past for family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles. Her discoveries find their way into books that blur the lines between the genres of poetry, biography, historical fiction, and nonfiction.
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Her prize-winning titles include Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom, winner of an NAACP Image Award, Caldecott Honor Medal, and Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration. Becoming Billie Holiday and Before John Was a Jazz Giant both won Coretta Scott King Honors; Birmingham, 1963 won the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and the Jefferson Cup; The Sound that Jazz Makes won the Carter G. Woodson Award from National Council for the Social Studies; and Remember the Bridge: Poems of a People and Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-ins both won North Carolina Juvenile Literature Awards. Weatherford received Golden Kite Honors from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators for Dear Mr. Rosenwald and Before John Was a Jazz Giant. Her books have been short-listed by the International Reading Association, National Council for the Social Studies, and Bank Street College of Education and have been named best books of the year by the American Library Association, School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and New York Public Library.
Winner of the Ragan-Rubin Award from the North Carolina English Teachers Association and a two-time North Carolina Arts Council Writers Fellow, Weatherford teaches children's and adolescent literature and professional writing courses at FSU. She also shares her love of reading and writing through programs at educational and cultural institutions. A North Carolina resident since 1985, she resides in High Point with her family.
Presiding over Fall Convocation will be Chancellor James. A. Anderson. Chancellor Anderson was named the 11th Chief Executive Officer of FSU on March 7, 2008. He comes to FSU from the
University of Albany in New York where he served as the Vice President for Student Success and Vice Provost for Institutional Assessment and Diversity. He also was a professor in the department of psychology.
Raised in Washington, D.C, Anderson majored in psychology at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1970. He later earned a doctoral degree in the field (1980) from Cornell University in New York. Early in his career, Chancellor Anderson chaired the Department of Psychology at Xavier University in News Orleans (1976-1983) before joining the Indiana University of Pennsylvania as a professor of psychology.
In 1992, he began an 11-year tenure as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs at North Carolina State University. In that role, he was credited with leading a revision of the general education curriculum, as well as the development of the First Year College, the Honors Programs, the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, the Minority Engineering Program, and the North Carolina State Diversity Initiative, among others.
In 2003, Anderson was recruited to Texas A&M University, a major land-grant institution serving more than 46,000 students, as Vice President and Associate Provost for Institutional Assessment and Diversity. He held that post until joining the University of Albany in 2005.
Founded in 1867, FSU is the second-oldest public institution in North Carolina. It offers nearly 70 degrees in the arts, sciences, business, and education at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral levels. It serves a student body of nearly 6,700 students and has a faculty and staff of approximately 900. During the university's illustrious history, there have been 11 chief executive officers. On June 8, 2008, Dr. Anderson assumed the Chancellorship.
For more information, please call (910) 672-1474.
PRESS CONTACT:
Treva Bentley
Fayetteville State University
910-672-1609
tbentley@uncfsu.edu
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