The Conferring of Honorary Degrees
Brenda Marie Osbey

Citation Presented by Adrienne J. Su, Assistant Professor of English, Poet-in-Residence
Conferring of the degree by William G. Durden, President

Brenda Marie Osbey, poet, essayist, professor, your spring 2005 appointment as poet laureate of the state of Louisiana could not have been better timed.

Long before Hurricane Katrina opened the nation's eyes to the human face of New Orleans , you were publishing poems and essays that captured particular lives there, lives that made and were made by the culture and history of your native city. Long before distant watchers of the news remarked concerning the displaced of New Orleans , "why can't they just move?", you were honing a body of work that answered the question not only for the intellect, but for the heart, through the uplifting combination of music, story, and voice that is good poetry.

Like your family, whose residence in the city dates back to the time of slavery, your poems are truly of New Orleans . In "Mother Catherine," the healer and saint of the spiritual church of New Orleans grants an interview; "The Evening News" pays personal tribute to Nina Simone; "The Business of Pursuit: San Malo's Prayer" takes on the voice of the martyred rebel leader of a maroon colony on the outskirts of the city. These poems appear in your fourth collection, All Saints: New and Selected Poems, winner of the 1998 American Book Award, along with poems that link your own life-and therefore our time-with historical ones.

You have influenced students as well as readers, through a distinguished teaching career that has taken you to the University of California at Los Angeles , Loyola University , Tulane University , and Dillard University , your alma mater and Dickinson 's partner in the Crossing Borders program.

Recognized by many awards, among them fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the MacDowell Colony, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, your works not only give us literary pleasure but also show that while American society may be mobile, its people-even those who in their disenfranchisement may seem to be voiceless-are by no means placeless. Nor, thanks to you, are they voiceless.

Mr. President, I am honored to present to you Brenda Marie Osbey for the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters.

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Brenda Marie Osbey , upon the recommendation of the Faculty to the Board of Trustees, and by its mandamus, I confer upon you the Degree of Doctor of Letters, with the rights, privileges, and distinction thereunto appertaining, in token of which I present you with this diploma and cause you to be invested with the hood of Dickinson College appropriate to your degree.

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