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Distinguished Faculty Lecture
to Feature Tech author Roy
By Sally Harris
A poet, a novelist, an artist, a professor, a former dean, and a sought-after
speaker on matters dealing with instructional technology, Lucinda Roy will
deliver a Distinguished Faculty Lecture February 9 as part of Virginia Tech's
125th Anniversary Celebration.
Roy's talk/reading, which begins at 7:30 p.m. in Squires Colonial Hall, will
be on "A Long Night's Journey into Day: Writing a Novel within Academe." A
light reception will be held before the talk, 6:30-7:15, in the Williamsburg
Room of Squires.
In her talk, Roy will discuss what it is like to write a novel while trying to
teach and be an administrator. She will also read from her just-published first
novel, Lady Moses, which a Publisher's Weekly reviewer called, in
a starred review, a "dazzling debut, an enchanting story...."
Roy has been at Virginia Tech since 1985, first as lecturer of English. She
was named assistant professor in 1987, associate professor in 1991, and
professor in 1997. In 1993, she was named assistant dean for projects in the
College of Arts and Sciences and, in 1994, associate dean for curriculum,
outreach, and diversity. She left that position in 1997 to concentrate on
teaching and writing. She held the Gloria D. Smith two-year endowed
professorship in black studies until May 1997. Recently, she was selected an
alumni distinguished professor of English.
Roy won the 1994 Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize for a book of poetry, and, as a
result, The Humming Birds was published in 1995. She is the author of
another book of poetry, Wailing the Dead to Sleep, published in London
in 1988. Her collections of poetry have been reviewed in Publisher's
Weekly (also a starred review), QBR, The Library Journal, The
Journal of West Indian Literature, and other magazines. Lady Moses
was published this winter by HarperCollins in the United States and will be
published by Virago/Little Brown in England in May 1988.
As associate dean, Roy had worked with the college's Cultural Diversity
Committee and served on the university's Academic Council for Outreach. She was
instrumental in the development of on-line courses and Internet-based
educational strategies and, as a result, was asked to speak across the country
on instructional technology. Besides serving on several
instructional-technology task forces, Roy helped initiate several new programs
using technology to benefit students and faculty members, including
Cyberschool, ACCESS, VTOPS, Service-Learning, Swap '94, and `A'-Tech.
