English Professor Edie Meidav Receives 2023 Provost Professor Honorific
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Provost Tricia Serio has announced that Edie Meidav, a professor in the Department of English, is one of four faculty members in 2023 to receive the lifetime honorific of Provost Professor. She is joined by Kenneth Carter (Polymer Science and Engineering); Robert DeConto (Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences); and Shelly Peyton (Chemical Engineering).
The title will be conferred at the Faculty Awards Dinner on Monday, May 8. Now in its second year, the campus-level faculty honorific recognizes exceptional achievement in research or creative activity and in teaching.
“It is my great honor to recognize the exceptional work of our 2023 Provost Professors,” says Serio. “They are truly emblematic of the excellence of our faculty.”
The author of five books—including her latest, “Another Love Discourse” (Terra Nova Press/2022)— Meidav has had a prolific writing career that has been supported by fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation, as well as creative Fulbrights in Sri Lanka and Cyprus, and residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, Yaddo, Macdowell, Fundacion Valparaiso, Vermont Studio Center, Art/OMI, and elsewhere.
“This is wonderful news and certainly a well-deserved recognition for Edie,” says Barbara Krauthamer, dean of the College of Humanities & Fine Arts.
Meidav’s work has been named an editors’ pick by prestigious papers such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She has also received several awards for her writing including the Kafka Prize for Best Novel by an American Woman and the Bard Fiction Prize for a writer under 40.
“What a gift that our school sees that humanities and fine arts can speak in a way that helps uplift our greater commonweal. None of us own any particular realm of knowledge, but how lucky that we get to join disciplines and enliven one another. How fortunate to have a welcoming school like ours in which we are encouraged to find creative solutions not just within our realms but reaching out toward our world’s most necessary issues. I am deeply honored by the provost’s leadership as well as the opportunity to listen and learn from all the many conversations encouraged by UMass and HFA.”
Called an “American original” by The Daily Beast, Meidav has also served as a judge for the PEN/Bingham first novel award, the NEA, Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Juniper Prize on several occasions, including this year for the novel and short story collection, and Yaddo. She has also servedas an editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal as well as having been a contributing editor at the International Literary Quarterly, while continuing as a senior editor at Conjunctions. Within the UMass Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers program, she is the founder of Radius, a projectbridging the narrative skills of the academy with underheard storytellers indiverse populations such as underage mothers, those in recovery, and writers currently or formerly incarcerated.
The 2023 Provost Professors were selected from a competitive group of nominations by the Provost Professor Selection Committee. The Provost Professor title is designated for tenure-system faculty who hold the rank of professor and do not hold a named or distinguished professorship.