Five Women in Higher Education Who Have Been Honored With Prestigious Awards

Zakiya Holmes Leggett, an assistant professor of forestry and the environment at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, has been selected to receive the Commitment to Human Diversity in Ecology Award from the Ecological Society of America. Dr. Leggett will be honored at the society’s meeting in New Orleans in August.

Dr. Leggett is a graduate of Tuskegee University in Alabama. She holds a master’s degree in forestry from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and a Ph.D. in forestry from North Carolina State University.

Brandon Hunt, professor in the College of Education at Georgia Southern University, will receive the Jane E. Myers Lifetime Mentor Award from the American Counseling Association. She joined the faculty at Georgia Southern in 2014 after teaching for 22 years at Pennsylvania State University.

Professor Hunt is a graduate of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where she double majored in English and psychology. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in counselor education from the University of Virginia.

Cynthia Nance, dean emerita of the School of Law and the Nathan G. Gordon Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, has been selected to receive the 2018 Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award from the Commission on Women in the Profession of the American Bar Association. She joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1994, and served as dean of the law school from 2006 to 2011.

Professor Nance is a graduate of Chicago State University. She holds a master’s degree in business and a juris doctorate from the University of Iowa.

Noy Holland, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, will receive the 2018 Katherine Ann Porter Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award comes with a $20,000 prize.

Professor Holland’s latest book is I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like: New and Selected Stories (Counterpoint, 2017). Her debut novel Bird was published in 2015. Professor Holland holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of Florida.

Wanda Heading-Grant, vice president for human resources, diversity, and multicultural affairs at the University of Vermont, received the Inclusive Excellence Award for individual leadership from the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.