In the News

Composer and lyricist PETER MILLS ’95 won the third annual Fred Ebb Award from the Fred Ebb Foundation for musical theater songwriting in November. A $50,000 prize, the award recognizes an emerging songwriter. A founding member of Prospect Theater Co. in New York, Mills has written the music and lyrics for The Rockae, a rock musical based on The Bacchae, and Illyria, a musical adaptation of Twelfth Night, among other works. His latest musical, Honor, an adaptation of As You Like It, ran through May 18 at the Hudson Guild Theatre in New York.

MADISON SMARTT BELL ’79, author of the novels All Souls’ Rising (1995) and The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004), about Haiti’s struggle for independence, and Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (2007), was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Strauss Livings award. The literary award provides each recipient $50,000 annually for five years so that he or she can focus on writing.  

JEFF DOLVEN, an associate professor of English at Princeton, received the 2007 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for outstanding literary criticism from the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University for his book Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance. Published last year by the University of Chicago Press, Dolven’s study explores how poetry entered 16th-century England’s school curriculum and the relationship between art and education. He received $1,000 and will speak at Western Kentucky University next fall.