At the end of each school year the MA English Lit. program awards two distinctions: the Thesis of the Year award, and the Christie Bowl Program Honoree award. As well, at the end of each school year Mercy College bestows a number of distinctions to students across the college. One such distinction is the Online Student of the Year award, and this year an MA student has received it. I would like to announce and celebrate the recipients of each of these distinctions here.

The Christie Bowl Program Honoree award is named for the late Joannes Christie who established and for a long time chaired Mercy College’s English Department. The annual awarding of a Christie Bowl (it is an actual bowl) to an undergraduate English program-honoree has long been a tradition at Mercy College. Last year the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, Dr. Tamara Jhashi, extended the distinction into our graduate MA program. The award, determined by the collective graduate faculty, recognizes one graduating student for their consistent academic excellence, classroom presence, and other contributions to the program’s scholarly learning community throughout their time in the program.

• The winner of the 2019 Christie Bowl is Alissa Greenwood.

All theses completed for ENGL 599 Master’s Thesis Tutorial courses during the summer and fall of 2018 and spring of 2019 were eligible for the Thesis of the Year title. The final paper is selected by faculty who have no thesis students’ papers in the running, who were not second-readers on any of the eligible theses, and who read over drafts from which all identifying information had been removed.

• The winner of the 2019 Thesis of the Year award is Jennifer Fiore for her paper: “If These Scars Could Talk: Giving Voice to Women’s Trauma Through the Personal Essay.”
  

Finally: each year, from out of the thousands of distance-learning students at Mercy College (not just in MA English Lit program but across all of the dozens of undergrad and grad programs here), the College recognizes one student for their extraordinary quality in the online academic environment. This year, for the first time in our MA program’s history, Mercy College has recognized one of our own for this distinction.

• The winner of the 2019 Mercy College Online Student of the Year Award is Richard Kovarovic.

I hope everyone in the program will join the faculty in congratulating Alissa, Jennifer, and Richard. It is extraordinarily difficult to locate any single person to honor for any of these awards out of the many exceptional students graduating each school year from our program and the college overall. So as we recognize these three honorees let us please also recognize all members of the graduating MA class of 2018-19 for their hard work and dedication that has gotten them to this moment of completing their MA degree in English Literature. Congratulations, everyone, and here’s to a summer of rest and exploration, in whatever parts you prefer.