The five African Americans in new diversity posts are Adrian Smith at the Univerity of Arkansas, Tashiana Bryant-Myrick at the California Institute of Technology, Brian Barker at Florida International Universitiy, Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and raven Baxter at the University of California, Irvine.
In 1981, Professor Cobb was appointed president of California State University, Fullerton. She was the first African American women to lead a major university west of the Mississippi River.
Rickey Laurentiis was selected as the winner of the 2016 Levis Reading Prize presented by Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and Bridgette Peteet, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Cincinnati, was honored by the American Psychological Foundation.
The award, which comes with a $100,000 prize, is given annually to a mid-career poet. Ross Gay teaches in the creative writing program at Indiana University and for the low-residency master of fine arts degree program in poetry at Drew University in New Jersey.
Thomas Sayers Ellis is serving as the Sterling Brown Professor of English and Humanities at Howard University and Cheryl Jones-Walker was promoted to associate professor at Swarthmore College.
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