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Posts tagged as “Columbia University”

Sjohnna McCray Wins the 2015 Walt Whitman Award from Academy of American Poets

By goodblacknews on May 3, 2015

Sjohnna McCray (Photo: savannahstate.edu)
Sjohnna McCray (Photo: savannahstate.edu)

Sjohnna McCray, an adjunct instructor in the department of English at Savannah State University in Georgia, has been selected to receive the 2015 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. The award, established in 1975, honors a poet of “exceptional promise” who has not yet published a book of poetry.
As the winner of the Walt Whitman Award, McCray will have his collection of poems entitled Rapture published by Graywolf Press in 2016. He will also receive an all-expenses-paid six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy.
McCray is a native of Cincinnati and is a graduate of Ohio University. He earned a master’s degree at Teachers College of Columbia University and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Virginia.
article via jbhe.com

Pomona College English Professor Claudia Rankine Wins National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

By goodblacknews on April 1, 2015

Professor and National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Claudia Rankine
Professor and National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Claudia Rankine (PHOTO: kcrw.com)

Claudia Rankine, the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, California, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for her book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014).
Rankine’s poetry recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Citizen is her fifth published poetry collection.1416441763-citizen
Earlier this year, Professor Rankine made literary history when she was the first author to have a work nominated as a finalist in two categories in the 39-year history of the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
Professor Rankine is a native of Jamaica. She is a graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and holds a master of fine arts degree in poetry from Columbia University.
article via jbhe.com

Suzan-Lori Parks Wins 2015 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History

By goodblacknews on March 12, 2015

Award Winning Playwright and Professor Suzan-Lori Parks
Award Winning Playwright and Professor Suzan-Lori Parks

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, who teaches creative writing at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, has been selected as the winner of the 2015 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History. The prize was established by Jean Kennedy Smith, the sister of Senator Edward Kennedy, and is administered by the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Columbia University in New York City.
Parks was honored for her play “Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3,” which was first staged at The Public Theater in New York last October. The Kennedy Prize comes with a $100,000 cash award.
Parks is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is a former MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award” winner. Professor Parks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her play “Topdog/Underdog.”
article via jbhe.com

Tonight's CNN Special "Witnessed: The Assassination of Malcolm X" Hopes to Answer What Really Happened in Audubon Ballroom

By goodblacknews on February 17, 2015
malcolmprayer
Almost 50 years ago, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, more popularly known as Malcolm X, who had risen to prominence as one of the most outspoken and public faces of the Nation of Islam, was gunned down inside the Audubon Ballroom in New York. And ever since his death Feb. 21, 1965, there has been speculation as to who had the civil rights leader murdered.
Some have argued that the government was complicit in his death; others have argued his public feud with NOI leader Elijah Muhammad may have led to his assassination. On Tuesday at 9 p.m., CNN premieres Witnessed: The Assassination of Malcolm X, a special report which asks some of those who were there when the shooting occurred—Earl Grant, former radio reporter Gene Simpson, Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz and Peter Bailey, an associate of Malcolm’s—to share their memories.
“We failed him, I tried to help him,” photographer and friend Grant cries, when describing the horrifying day inside the Audubon Ballroom, and “describes the chaotic moments after the shooting.” Grant takes viewers inside his private photo collection, sharing never-before-seen images of the civil rights icon.
Zaheer Ali, who served as project manager of the Malcolm X Project at Columbia University, leads an online experience at cnn.com that delves into the unanswered questions surrounding the assassination. Bailey describes Malcolm’s plan to expose injustices against black Americans before he was gunned down, and Simpson, who was in the front row of the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm took the stage, discusses the first time he interviewed the civil rights leader.
article by Stephen A. Crockett Jr. via theroot.com

QuestBridge Helps Smart Students from Low-Income Families Earn 4-Year Tuition-Free Rides to Elite Colleges

By goodblacknews on September 17, 2014
Shawon Jackson went to Princeton University via the Questbridge program and is president of the student government there. (Michael Kirby Smith, NEW YORK TIMES)
Shawon Jackson went to Princeton University via the Questbridge program and is president of the student government there. (Michael Kirby Smith, NEW YORK TIMES)

Arianna Trickey was opening a piece of mail in her bedroom during junior year of high school when a pamphlet fell out of the envelope. The pamphlet seemed to offer the impossible: the prospect of a full scholarship to several of her dream colleges.

She went running out to her father, a house painter, who was sitting on the family’s porch in Grass Valley, a California city in the Sierra Nevada foothills. “You have to see this,” she told him. “This is the scholarship that will get me to the best schools in the country.”

The pamphlet was from a nonprofit organization called QuestBridge, which has quietly become one of the biggest players in elite-college admissions. Almost 300 undergraduates at Stanford this year, or 4 percent of the student body, came through QuestBridge. The share at Amherst is 11 percent, and it’s 9 percent at Pomona. At Yale, the admissions office has changed its application to make it more like QuestBridge’s.

Founded by a married couple in Northern California — she an entrepreneur, he a doctor-turned-medical-investor — QuestBridge has figured out how to convince thousands of high-achieving, low-income students that they really can attend a top college. “It’s like a national admissions office,” said Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar.

The growth of QuestBridge has broader lessons for higher education — and for closing the yawning achievement gap between rich and poor teenagers. That gap is one of the biggest reasons that moving up the economic ladder is so hard in the United States today. But QuestBridge’s efforts are innovative enough to deserve their own attention.

In addition to the hundreds of its students on college campuses today, hundreds more have graduated over the last decade. They’ve gone on to become professors, teachers, business people, doctors and many other things. Ms. Trickey, a senior at the University of Virginia who is also getting a master’s in education, plans to become an elementary-school teacher in a low-income area.

College admissions officers attribute the organization’s success to the simplicity of its approach to students. It avoids mind-numbingly complex talk of financial-aid forms and formulas that scare away so many low-income families (and frustrate so many middle-income families, like my own when I was applying to college). QuestBridge instead gives students a simple message: If you get in, you can go.

Yet the broader lessons of QuestBridge aren’t only about how to communicate with students. They’re also how our society spends the limited resource that is financial aid.

The group’s founders, Michael and Ana Rowena McCullough, are now turning their attention to the estimated $3 billion in outside scholarships, from local Rotary Clubs, corporations and other groups, that are awarded every year to high school seniors. The McCulloughs see this money as a wasted opportunity, saying it comes too late to affect whether and where students go to college. It doesn’t help the many high-achieving, low-income strivers who don’t apply to top colleges — and often don’t graduate from any college.

“Any private scholarship given at the end of senior year is intrinsically disconnected from the college application process,” Dr. McCullough said, “and it doesn’t have to be.”

They plan to offer prizes in some cases to high school juniors, like a summer program or a free laptop, to persuade them to apply. To win the prize, the junior would need to fill out a detailed application, which could become the basis for his or her college application. The idea draws on social science research, which has shown that people often respond better to tangible, short-term incentives (a free laptop) than to complicated, longer-term ones (a college degree, which will improve your life and which you can afford). Two pilot programs started with donors — one focused on New Yorkers, one on low-income Jewish students — have had encouraging results, the McCulloughs say.

QuestBridge has its roots in summer programs they started as Stanford students in the 1980s and 1990s. The initial one helped Dr. McCullough, who had paid his own way through Stanford, win a Rhodes scholarship.

Terranisha Hiley is a senior at Columbia University. (Ruth Fremson, NEW YORK TIMES)
Terranisha Hiley is a senior at Columbia University. (Ruth Fremson, NEW YORK TIMES)

The programs tried to lift the ambitions of talented teenagers from modest backgrounds, by introducing them to peers and to successful adults. “The combination of seeing what can be done and then having someone you respect telling you you can do it — I think that’s what most young people need,” said Nico Slate, who attended a program in 1996. A native of a small town in the Mojave Desert, he is now a history professor at Carnegie Mellon and studies social movements in India and the United States.

Eventually, the McCulloughs realized the growing applicant pool to their summer program consisted of exactly the students whom top colleges said they wanted to recruit. So the couple began approaching admissions officers with plans for a new program the colleges would help pay for. QuestBridge uses traditional databases, like those with SAT scores, as well as networks of high school teachers and others to recruit students. It has an early application deadline, in late September, and a long application form, designed to get students to tell the story of their lives.

Festus Ohan, 22, Overcomes Troubled Teen Foster Care Years to Finish College and Earn Acceptance to 7 Top Medical Schools

By goodblacknews on June 16, 2014

festusohanHe led a tough life. The odds were stacked against him and, at one time, it did seem that he wouldn’t be able to make it through high school. He, and almost everyone around him, just couldn’t imagine seeing him succeed.
But that is exactly what Festus Ohan, 22, did: he succeeded.  Festus spent his teen years in foster care. He remembers the day his father left him.
“I went to bed in tears, crying, praying, [and] asking God ‘Why did this happen to me?’” Festus says. Over the years, he was passed on from one family to another, so many of them in fact, that even he isn’t sure about the exact number – seven or eight is his best estimate.
All he knows is that the time he spent in the foster care system “was the worst time” in his life. It didn’t help with his education either.
“Early on in high school, I got in trouble for fighting a lot,” Festus says, “and I was in a pre-expulsion contract.”
His ultimate dream was to become a doctor. But the life he was living almost made it impossible for him to keep that dream alive.
Those that were actually supposed to encourage him were the ones that were discouraging him. “Constantly hearing my foster parents throw statistics at me, about there’s only a 1 percent chance that a foster kid will even graduate college, let alone attend professional school, kind of impacted me in a way,” Festus says.
That’s all changed now. Festus is about to graduate from University of California, Riverside with a degree in neuroscience. He’s so good at his studies that, so far, he has been accepted to 7 medical schools all over the country: Northwestern University, Columbia University, Cornell University, University of California, San Francisco, University of Houston, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Southern California.
But Festus has made up his mind; he’s headed to UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine where he has been offered a fellowship that covers all expenses.
“I actually start Aug. 4, so I’ll have like a 6-week break,” Festus says, “but I’m excited for the next step in my journey.”
article by Liku Zelleke via themedicalblog.net

Here Comes Another One! New York Teen Kwasi Enin Accepted to All 8 Ivy League Colleges

By goodblacknews on April 1, 2014

Kwasi Enin
Three days ago, Good Black News shared an article about Washington D.C. wunderkind Avery Coffey, who was accepted to five Ivy League colleges.  Today, 17-year-old New Yorker, violist and aspiring physician Kwasi Enin went one better – make that three better – and earned acceptance to all EIGHT Ivys!
According to usatoday.com, the acceptances began rolling in over the past few months, and by late last week when he opened an e-mail from Harvard, Enin found he’d been accepted to every one. School district officials provided scanned copies of acceptance letters from all eight on Monday. Yale confirmed that it was holding a spot for Enin.
The feat is extremely rare, say college counselors — few students even apply to all eight, because each seeks different qualities in their freshman class. Almost none are invited to attend them all. The Ivy League colleges are among the nation’s most elite.
“My heart skipped a beat when he told me he was applying to all eight,” says Nancy Winkler, a guidance counselor at William Floyd High School, where Enin attends class. In 29 years as a counselor, she says, she’s never seen anything like this. “It’s a big deal when we have students apply to one or two Ivies. To get into one or two is huge. It was extraordinary.”
For most of the eight schools, acceptance comes rarely, even among the USA’s top students. At the top end, Cornell University admitted only 14% of applicants. Harvard accepted just 5.9%.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to Lead Viewers on "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey"

By goodblacknews on January 13, 2014

Neil Degrasse Tyson
NEW YORK — Bringing a long list of prepared questions to an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson is a fool’s errand. That’s not to say a conversation with the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History isn’t illuminating — quite the opposite.  It’s just that the gregarious astrophysicist can’t help but find science lurking in every corner, turning even the most banal transaction into a teaching moment. An offer of bottled water, for instance, unexpectedly turns into a lengthy digression about the difficulty of freezing distilled water and the origins of Gatorade.

Tyson’s zeal for knowledge is intoxicating and irresistible, even if it means less time for the ostensible topic of the conversation — his starring role in the documentary series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, premiering on Fox and National Geographic in March.  “I see myself as a servant of the public appetite for the universe,” says Tyson, seated in his office overlooking the giant white sphere of the Hayden Planetarium.
Scattered among hundreds of astronomy books are, among other things, a vanity plate reading “COZMIC,” a life-sized bust of Sir Isaac Newton, a half-dozen or so globes, a quill pen collection, a can of Dole pineapples in “cosmic fun shapes” and a pink boa.
Tyson’s combination of humor, intelligence and accessibility have made him one of the most recognizable scientists in the country and put him atop many fantasy dinner-party guest lists. The author or editor of 10 books, he maintains an active social media presence (1.5 million Twitter followers) and produces a radio show and podcast, “StarTalk Radio.” He’s also become a late-night TV regular, through frequent visits to The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Real Time With Bill Maher.
Now he’s moving into prime time with Cosmos, a follow-up to Carl Sagan’s groundbreaking 1980 PBS series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. In what may seem like an odd pairing, Seth MacFarlane serves as executive producer on the series. Tyson first met the Family Guy creator at a gathering of the Science and Entertainment Exchange in Los Angeles several years ago and later pitched him about getting involved in a Cosmos reboot.

DaVita Vance-Cooks Becomes 1st African American and Female to Run U.S. Government Printing Office

By goodblacknews on August 5, 2013

davita-vance-cooks
DaVita Vance-Cooks was just named the nation’s public printer, making her both the first female and the first African American to lead the Government Printing Office in the agency’s 152-year history. Vance-Cooks’ appointment was approved by unanimous vote in the U.S. Senate. President Barack Obama nominated her for the position earlier this year.  DaVita Vance-Cooks is a graduate from Tufts University with an MBA from Columbia University.
It has been a mission of the new GPO head to re-brand the Government Printing Office and bring them up to speed in our digital society. She led the agency’s effort to partner with Google to sell federal publications in an eBook format, launched an award-winning government book blog, modernized GPO’s customer contact center, and led the renovation of the agency’s retail bookstore in Washington, D.C.  Her work led to an appointment as Deputy Public Printer in 2011.
DaVita Vance-Cooks joined the Government Printing Office in 2004. She began as the Deputy Managing Director of Customer Services, with the responsibility of overseeing the office’s liaison with federal agencies for in-house print production and printing procurement services. Under Vance-Cooks, the GPO awarded approximately $500 million dollars annually in printing contracts to the private industry and oversaw the award of a $50 million contract for the production of 2010 census materials, which was one of the largest procurements in the government agency’s history.
For the first time since 2008, GPO completed its fiscal year 2012 with a positive net income and reduced overhead costs. Under Vance-Cooks, the GPO pioneered new mobile apps, expanded the scope of information made available through the federal digital system and opened a secure credential site.
article by Erica L. Taylor via blackamericaweb.com

Education Policy Advisor David J. Johns Named New Director of White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans

By goodblacknews on March 22, 2013

David J. JohnsDavid J. Johns has been appointed as the executive director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans. As executive director Johns will be asked to identify evidence-based best practices to improve African American student achievement from cradle to career. The goal of the initiative is to work with federal, state, and local agencies as well as community groups to produce a more effective continuum of education programs for African-American students.
Johns has been serving as a senior education policy advisor to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. He is a former elementary school teacher in New York City.
Johns is a graduate of Columbia University where he triple majored in English, creative writing, and African-American studies. He earned a master’s degree in sociology and education policy at Teachers College of Columbia University.
article via The New Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans : The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.