Provost Steve Kapelke has announced this year’s appointments for Distinguished College Teacher, Artist, and Scholar. Beau Beaudoin, Joe Meno, and Tony Trigilio will serve in these positions for the 2009–10 and 2010–11 academic years.

Distinguished College Teacher: Beau Beaudoin, Television

Beau Beaudoin was recently named the 2008 Illinois Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. She has presented papers and facilitated workshops at a variety of national conferences, and was responsible for the development of the college’s Culture, Race, and Media course, which now enrolls more than 30 sections each semester. Television department chair Michael Niederman notes, “Beau personifies the criteria” of a Distinguished College Teacher.

Distinguished College Artist: Joe Meno, Fiction Writing

Fiction writing department chair Randy Albers says Joe Meno “is the hardest-working writer I know.” Meno has written, in a relatively short time, six books issued by notable publishers. He has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Midland Authors Award for Fiction, and three Illinois Arts Council awards. He has also published many short stories in such prestigious journals as Tri-Quarterly and Mid-America Review and is the author of eight plays. The quality and diversity of Meno’s work exemplify the very best of our faculty’s creative endeavors.

Distinguished College Scholar: Tony Trigilio, English

A scholar and poet, Tony Trigilio continues to be one of the most productive members of the college’s faculty. The author of Strange Prophesies Anew: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D. and Ginsberg, Trigilio is one of the nation’s foremost scholars on Beat literature, and the organizer of the Beat Generation Symposium at Columbia College Chicago in the fall of 2008. His recent Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics has been hailed as a significant contribution to the body of Ginsberg criticism. His scholarly and creative interests are broad; he coedited Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers, 2008). Trigilio is currently working on two scholarly projects: one on Diane DiPrima’s spiritual poetics, and an edited volume of fragments of the poems of Beat writer Elise Cowen.