Alumni News

Hayden Benson (B.A and M.A.) won the 2021 Phi Theta Kappa Georgia Region Paragon Award for New Advisors. This award is given to PTK advisors who have served in their roles for less than 3 years and have shown excellent commitment to their chapter’s and students’ successes. Hayden has been serving as a full time English faculty member and co-advisor for the Athens Technical College chapter of PTK since May 2020. She also hosted a virtual Georgia Region conference for students and faculty across Georgia with her PTK chapter at Athens Technical College in Spring 2021. The theme of the conference was "Expressions of Justice" and featured speakers such as Dr. Ed Pavlic, Dr. Andrea Daniel (ATC President), C.E.O. Michael Thurmond, Deborah Gonzalez, D.A., and several others.

Bill King (M.A. and Ph.D)  is a Pushcart Prize nominee who has been published in many journals and anthologies, including 100 Word Story, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Still: The Journal, Kestrel, and Appalachian Heritage. He teaches creative writing and literature at Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, WV. His chapbook, from Finishing Line Press, is The Letting Go (2018).

I hear geese. 

They are hooting under a starlight too thin for shadows—over and over again—except that it’s me shouting gibberish to the ones that move beneath, silent and mute, until one of them pins an arm to the gurney, and says, Sir. It’s ok. You have cancer. Oh, and thank you , I say, and start trying to find a window with my eyes. 

Three days until I’m on my feet but the nurse’s aide has her own set of problems:Rita, that’s my daughter, dumped the grandbaby at my door before I even got to sleep. 12-hour shift. Didn’t get a wink. And can you believe? Won’t find a job. I was almost too late to make the bus, but here I am, she says, slow-shuffling me and my IV pole the fifty feet from my bed, down a mine shaft of fluorescence and bleach, to the window at the end of the hall.

From "POST-SURGERY" by Bill King

Sarah Mayo (Ph.D) published two articles based on her dissertation research this fall in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Shakespeare Studies. Sarah also began working as a Publishing Editor at the Public Library of Science, an open-access scientific research publisher based out of San Francisco, California.