Opening Convocation Set for Noon, Jan. 17

Opening Convocation for the Easter semester at the University will be at noon, Friday, Jan. 17, in All Saints’ Chapel. Honorary degrees will be presented and new members will be inducted into the Order of Gownsmen. Louise Cowan, author, professor and pioneer in liberal arts education, will give the Convocation address and will receive an honorary degree. Poet and author Marilyn Nelson will also receive an honorary degree during the Convocation, and will give a reading Jan. 16 during her visit to the Sewanee campus.

Louise Shillingburg Cowan has had a long and distinguished career in education. She is a professor emerita at the University of Dallas, served as dean of the graduate school there, founded the university’s doctoral program, and co-founded the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. She was the Fugitive Group’s official historian, resulting in her book, “The Fugitive Group: A Literary History.” Cowan is best known for her teaching and her impact on students, and continued to teach into her 90s. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush bestowed upon Cowan the nation’s highest award for achievement in the humanities, the Charles Frankel Prize. She was honored by Laura Bush in 2001 for the establishment of The Teachers Institute at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, and has been named to a list of the 20 most brilliant living Christian professors.

Marilyn Nelson is a poet, translator, children’s book author and professor emerita at the University of Connecticut. She is the author or translator of more than a dozen books, including “The Homeplace,” “The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems” and “Carver: A Life in Poems.” Her book “A Wreath for Emmett Till” presents 15 interlinked sonnets to pay tribute to Emmitt Till, a 14-year-old African American boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman, and whose murderers were acquitted. Nelson served as the Connecticut Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2006, and she is currently Poet-in-Residence at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City. Nelson taught at Sewanee as a Brown Foundation Fellow during the 2011 Easter semester, co-creating a course that addressed poetry, spirituality and the environment. She has received many honors, including two Boston-Horn Book Awards, the Poet’s Prize, the Printz Honor Award, three Coretta Scott King Honor Awards, and the 2012 Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for her “distinguished lifetime service to American poetry.”