Former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove (photo via commons.wikipedia.org)
Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, according to jbhe.com. The award is given annually to recognize “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” Established in 1994, the award comes with a $100,000 prize.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987 for Thomas and Beulah, Dove also served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. She is the only poet to receive the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts.
Dove has published 10 collections of poetry including her latest book Collected Poems, 1974-2004(2016). In addition to poetry, Dove has published a book of short stories and the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992).
Dove is a summa cum laude graduate of Miami University in Ohio, where she majored in English. She holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa, and joined the faculty at the University of Virginia in 1989.
Eliud Kipchoge wins INEOS 1:59 Challenge in Vienna, Austria (image via twitter.com)
According to bbc.com, elite Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge, 34, has become the first athlete to run a marathon in under two hours, beating the mark by 20 seconds.
Kipchoge covered the 26.2 miles in one hour 59 minutes 40 seconds in the Ineos 1:59 Challenge in Vienna, Austria on Saturday.
This feat will not be recognized officially as the marathon world record because it was not in open competition and he used a team of rotating pacemakers.
“This shows no-one is limited,” said Kipchoge. “Now I’ve done it, I am expecting more people to do it after me.”
Ethiopian Prime Minister Ahmed Ali (photo via commons.wikipedia.org)
According to the New York Times, Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his work in restarting peace talks with neighboring Eritrea and beginning to restore freedoms in his country after decades of political and economic repression.
To quote the article:
Abiy, 43, broke through two decades of frozen conflict between his vast country, Africa’s second most populous, and Eritrea, its small and isolated neighbor. When he became prime minister of Ethiopia in 2018, he threw himself at a breakneck pace into reforms at home, and peace negotiations with the rebel-turned-dictator Isaias Afwerki, president of Eritrea.
According to bbc.com, Peter Tabichi, a science teacher from rural Kenya, who gives away most of his salary to support his students, has won the 2019 Global Teacher Prize, a $1 million prize for the world’s best teacher.
Tabichi, a member of the Franciscan religious order, has been lauded for his achievements in a deprived school with crowded classes and few text books.
The award, announced in a ceremony in Dubai, recognizes the “exceptional” teacher’s commitment to pupils in a remote part of Kenya’s Rift Valley.
“It’s not all about money,” says Tabichi, whose pupils are almost all from very disadvantaged families. Many are orphaned or have lost a parent. He gives away 80% of his pay at the Keriko Mixed Day Secondary School in Pwani Village, Nakuru to pupils who otherwise could not afford uniforms or books.
“As a teacher working on the front line I have seen the promise of its young people – their curiosity, talent, their intelligence, their belief,” Tabichi said.
“Africa’s young people will no longer be held back by low expectations. Africa will produce scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs whose names will be one day famous in every corner of the world. And girls will be a huge part of this story.”
The award, in a competition run by the Varkey Foundation, came from 10,000 other nominations from 179 countries.
Tabichi’s pupils have been successful in national and international science competitions, including an award from the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK.
The judges said that his work at the school had “dramatically improved his pupils’ achievement”, with many more now going on to college or university, despite resources at the schools being “severely constrained.”
The founder of the prize, Sunny Varkey, says he hopes Tabichi’s story “will inspire those looking to enter the teaching profession and shine a powerful spotlight on the incredible work teachers do all over Kenya and throughout the world every day.”
According to jbhe.com, Warren Washington, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has received the 2019 Tyler Prize for environmental achievement.
The award, administered by the University of Southern California, recognizes passionate environmental science dedication across a spectrum of environmental research fields. It is the premiere international award for environmental science and is often referred to as the “Nobel for the Environment.” Dr. Washington will share the award’s $200,000 honorarium with this year’s other winner, Michael Mann.
Dr. Washington’s research focuses on creating atmospheric computer models that use fundamental laws of physics to predict future states of the atmosphere and help scientists understand climate change. His past research involved using general circulation models and the Parallel Climate Model.
Before computers, our understanding of Earth’s climate was based purely on observations and theory; scientists were simply unable to calculate the complex interactions within and between Earth’s land, ocean, and atmosphere.
Recognizing the potential of early 1960’s computers, Washington overcame extraordinary technical limitations to collaborate on the construction of one of the first-ever computer models of Earth’s climate. As computing power increased, Dr. Washington lead a cooperative effort to make additions to his atmospheric climate model, including oceans, sea ice, and rising CO2 levels.
These early models allowed scientists to predict the impact of increasing CO2, and were instrumental to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment – for which Dr. Washington shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. His current research involves using the Community Earth System Model to study the impacts of climate change in the 21st century.
Considered a global leader in climate modeling, Dr. Washington advised six U.S. Presidents on Climate Change: Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama. Dr. Washington’s public service was recognized by President Obama, who awarded him the 2010 National Medal of Science.
“Dr. Washington literally wrote the earliest book on climate modeling,” said Shirley Malcom, Director of Education and Human Resources at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), of his seminal work, An Introduction to Three-Dimensional Climate Modeling – co-written with Dr. Claire Parkinson.
“Dr. Washington has been a pioneering climate scientist for over 40 years and has been at the leading edge of climate model development,” said Prof. John Shepherd, former Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. “Much of what is known about the Earth’s climate system and climate modeling is directly traceable to the lifelong work of Dr. Washington.”
Dr. Washington has served on the National Science Board as a member from 1994 to 2006 and as its chair from 2002 to 2006. In 2010, he was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Obama.
Washington holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in meteorology both from Oregon State University, as well as a Ph.D. in meteorology from Pennsylvania State University.
According to jbhe.com, Dr. Tera W. Hunter, the Edwards Professor of History and professor of African American studies at Princeton University, has earned the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in women’s history and/or feminist theory as well as the Littleton-Griswold Prize in U.S. law and society from the American Historical Association. She will receive her honors at the association’s annual meeting in Chicago this coming January.
Professor Hunter’s book Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 2017) is what garnered her the above awards. Hunter’s great-great grandparents were enslaved, freed, and married during the Reconstruction era in the U.S. In the book,Hunter used her research of court records, legal documents, and personal diaries to examine the constraints the system of slavery placed on intimate relationships.
Earlier in 2018, Hunter also garnered the Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians for Bound in Wedlock.
Professor Hunter joined the faculty at Princeton in 2007 after teaching previously at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Dr. Hunter is a graduate of Duke University, where she majored in history, and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University.
When Nike selected Colin Kaepernick to be the face of its “Just Do It” 30th-anniversary ad campaign, one analyst noted that the move proved the company knows its customer, and they would boost sales.
Nearly two weeks after the ad provoked calls for boycotts, shares hit an all-time high, closing at $83.47 Thursday — an all-time high for the company.
According to a report from Bloomberg, Nike had previously faced a dip in its stock price immediately after its Kaepernick announcement, dropping nearly 3 percent in the next day of trading at the New York Stock Exchange. That fall has since been made up and more, per Yahoo.
Nike’s Colin Kaepernick ‘Just do it’ campaign is a two-minute video featuring the former 49er narrating stories of athletes who have beaten the odds, ending with the words: “It’s only crazy until you do it,” then changing to “Just do it.”
According to Variety.com, all four winners in the guest actor categories were black for the first time in Television Academy Awards history.
Presented tonight at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards ceremony, Tiffany Haddish won best guest actress in a comedy for hosting “Saturday Night Live,”Samira Wiley won best guest actress in a drama for “The Handmaid’s Tale,”Ron Cephas Jones won best guest actor in a drama for “This Is Us,” and Katt Williams won best guest actor in a comedy for “Atlanta.”
Comedians Williams and Haddish won in their first year being nominated, while both Jones and Wiley had been nominated previously.
As Variety noted when this year’s Emmy nominees were announced, 36 actors of color were nominated this for the 70th Primetime Emmy Awards, up 20% from the year before, amid a larger push in the entertainment industry for diversity and inclusion in television, in front of and behind the camera.
The winners of the Hugo Awards, considered some of the most prestigious science fiction and fantasy literary prizes, were announced on Sunday, with science fiction author N.K. Jemisin making history as the first writer ever to win the best novel award three years in a row.
During her acceptance speech at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA, Jemisin said, “I get a lot of questions about where the themes of the Broken Earth trilogy come from. I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m drawing on the human history of structural oppression, as well as my feelings about this moment in American history.”
But she also sounded a note of optimism.
“I want you to remember that 2018 is also a good year. This is a year in which records have been set,” Jemisin said. “A year in which even the most privilege-blindered of us has been forced to acknowledge that the world is broken and needs fixing — and that’s a good thing! Acknowledging the problem is the first step toward fixing it. I look to science fiction and fantasy as the aspirational drive of the Zeitgeist: We creators are the engineers of possibility. And as this genre finally, however grudgingly, acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalized matter and that all of us have a future, so will go the world.”
Jemisin’s fans took to Twitter to celebrate her historic hat trick. Among them was her cousin, the television host and comedian W. Kamau Bell, who noted that Jemisin’s books have yet to be adapted into film:
So which writer &/or journalist is writing the story of the Black woman (@nkjemisin) who's the 1st person to win 3 #HugoAwards IN A ROW? Focusing on the significance of a Black woman doing this & the telling fact that her books have yet to show up onscreen as films/TV shows?
Television producer Shonda Rhimes responded to Bell with a link to a year-old Deadline story about “The Fifth Season” being adapted into a TNT television program, and Jemisin replied.
Despite a 14-month maternity leave, Serena Williams has topped Forbes’ “Highest-Paid Female Athlete” list for the third consecutive year.
Due to her pregnancy in January 2017, Williams was off the court for the majority of the past year, leaving her with only $62,000 in winnings. Still, the 23-time Grand Slam champion collected twice as many off-court coins than any other female athlete.
Earning $18.1 million in endorsements, Williams was able to top the list by over $5 million, with Australian Open winner Dane Caroline Wozniacki second in line.
Though Forbes did not include a woman in their ranking of the world’s top 100 highest earning athletes of 2018 after Williams’ earnings fell by approximately $10 million since the year prior, only 16 male athletes earned more than Williams in sponsorship money over the last 12 months.
In addition to over a dozen sponsors including Nike, Intel, Audemars Piguet, JPMorgan Chase, Lincoln, Gatorade and Beats, Williams also launched her first solo fashion compilation, Serena, in May.
Williams is currently gearing up to match Margaret Court’s 24 grand slam title record at this year’s US Open.
Professor Hunter’s book 
During her acceptance speech at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA, Jemisin said, “I get a lot of questions about where the themes of the Broken Earth trilogy come from. I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m drawing on the human history of structural oppression, as well as my feelings about this moment in American history.”