Hoffman was widely respected at Fordham for her interdisciplinary expertise and collaborative spirit. 

Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., a professor of English, said that despite their different fields of study, they grew to be fast friends.

“I always knew we spoke the same language. Decade after decade, our conversations about one another’s work were immensely gratifying,” she said.

Magda Teter, Ph.D., the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham, called Hoffman “a beloved member of Fordham’s Jewish Studies community” and said her work was marked by “great erudition and disciplinary depth.” 

“In her 1991 work on the Hebrew writer and Nobel Prize laureate S.Y. Agnon, she deployed a wide range of theoretical tools, ranging from psychoanalysis to feminist theory,” Teter said.

“She placed Agnon in conversation with other writers, such as James Joyce, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. … She was able to handle, with equal care and knowledge, traditional Jewish text and modern philosophy.

Hoffman was born on June 19, 1946, in New York City and grew up, along with her younger brother, David, in Brooklyn. She earned a bachelor’s in English and Comparative Literature from Cornell University and a master’s and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She was a special member of Columbia’s Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine.

She joined Fordham in 1979 and taught courses in Israeli literature and film as part of Fordham’s Middle East Studies program. In 1992, she created the annual Nostra Aetate Dialogue series, which brought together Jewish and Christian scholars to address questions pertinent to Jewish-Catholic reconciliation. In 2002, she also helped found Fordham’s Jewish Texts Reading Group, which still meets today. 

Hoffman was an accomplished painter. In 2015, she opened up about her creative process in a lecture at the Walsh Library. Last November, her art was displayed at Fordham’s Butler Gallery. 

Hoffman was known at Fordham as a skilled instructor and generous mentor. Fordham professor of biology Jason Morris, Ph.D., said she taught him how to be a better teacher.

“I learned so much from teaching with Anne. She appreciated nuance: she had a deep mistrust of facile answers and sharply drawn lines,” he wrote in an email.

“Her integrity and her empathy (and despite what she said, her expertise) came across in everything she said and did.”

In 2003, she was honored with Fordham’s Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities Award, and in 2019, she was recognized for 40 years of service at Fordham. She retired in 2023 and was named professor emerita.

Nikolas Oktaba, a 2015 graduate, took a class with Hoffman, and like many students, he kept in touch with her after graduation. He called her a “fount of tranquil wisdom.” 

“Not only did she put her students first, but she did so in a way that allowed them to see the perseverance, resilience, and strength that they already held within them,” he said. 

At the time of her death, in addition to her painting, she was teaching writing skills at the Fortune Society, teaching Freud at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and conducting friendship-focused writing groups at the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Bangladesh via Zoom.

Leon Hoffman, M.D., Anne’s husband of 57 years, said that he would forever hold onto a memory of the two of them walking together when she was an undergraduate and he was attending medical school.

“We had one of those adolescent discussions of the time: would we marry someone who was not Jewish? I responded very quickly, ‘That is an academic discussion because I am going to marry you.’ She was shocked, but the rest is history,” he said.

“We were not tied at the hip, but we were tied with our brains and our love.”

In an interview last year, Hoffman recalled what her late father-in-law said when she received her first summer grant to travel to Israel to explore Agnon’s archive. 

“He observed that it truly is the ‘goldeneh medineh’ (a Yiddish term referring to the U.S. as the golden land) when a Catholic university gives a Jewish girl money to go to Israel to work on Agnon,” she said. 

“Even more than the material support, his remark captures something of the openness and generosity that have been my experience of this university, my academic home for over 40 years.” 

Hoffman is survived by her husband, Leon Hoffman, M.D.; her children, Miriam Hoffman, M.D. (Steven Kleiner, M.D.) and Liora Hoffman, Ph.D. (Rob Yalen); her brother, David Golomb; her niece, Danielle Golomb, M.D.; her nephew, Jesse Golomb; and her grandchildren Shoshana, Elisheva, and Hillel Hoffman Kleiner and Greta and Max Yalen.

A memorial service open to the University community will be announced at a later date.

The Many Voices Prize was established in June by Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., the Fordham English professor who also helped establish The Observer itself in 1981 and served as its adviser for 35 years. Carrying a cash award of $1,500, the prize will be awarded with a preference for Observer staffers who are first in their families to attend college or who come from other underrepresented groups.

Stone, a first-generation college graduate herself, believes that journalism has “a kind of moral obligation to be a big table at which everybody could sit.”

The prize is “a way to invite people to the journalistic table,” she said. “The hope is that once they join, they will feel invited, and they will speak what’s on their mind, they will do stories that are on their mind.”

Stone’s gift advances a key priority of Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, which seeks to reinvest in the entire student experience and foster a more diverse and inclusive Fordham community.

Stone’s gift will fund one Many Voices prize in the coming academic year and eventually three per year. The prize will be awarded for three nonfiction articles or their equivalent published in The Observer, either in print or online, by a staff member. In addition to writing, these works could include video, podcasts, photography, graphic design, graphic texts, cartoons, or other formats that emerge from the evolving media landscape, Stone said.

Alumni Involvement

The prize is coupled with a new effort to advance the career development of Observer staff members by harnessing the connections and expertise of Observer alumni, many of whom got their professional start on the award-winning publication and stay in touch with each other.

An alumni advisory board, formed from the Observer Alumni Affinity Chapter, is being created to advise Student Affairs in awarding the prize and to help connect the paper’s staff members with mentoring, networking, internship, and job opportunities. The board will also help with fundraising to augment the prize, said Anthony Hazell, FCLC ’07, communications director for a K-12 private school and The Observer’s editorial adviser since 2016.

Students for whom the award is meant are often working to meet their college expenses, “so hopefully offering a financial award to make up for the time that they spend on The Observer can help get their voices heard,” said Hazell, who served as the paper’s editor in chief as an undergraduate.

Stone announced the prize June 9 at the annual Block Party celebration at the Lincoln Center campus, saying that a robust diversity of journalistic voices is needed for the survival of our democracy.

The award also reflects her own experiences, she said in an interview. She challenged stereotypes in one of her earliest pieces of journalism, “It’s Still Hard to Grow Up Italian”—published in The New York Times in 1978, it incorporated narratives by several Italian Americans, and much of her early writing was about being the granddaughter of Italian immigrants at a time when, in popular culture, Italians were routinely associated with the mafia.

She hopes the prize will inspire people from underrepresented or misrepresented groups to speak out as well. “What I really hope is that they will speak to who they are, in terms of the subjects that interest them, the politics that interest them, the personal essays that interest them, in the same way that I did.”

Striving for Diversity

Allie Stofer, Observer editor in chief and an incoming senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, said she was excited to learn about the award because its cash prize could help students of diverse backgrounds make the time commitment required of Observer staffers. Maddie Sandholm, the managing editor and also an incoming senior at the college, noted that the Observer will also award a new $1,200 scholarship to one of its staff members in the coming year for similar purposes.

She said the paper has been making other diversity-related efforts in recent years, such as relaxing its meeting attendance requirement—to accommodate potential staffers who have conflicts—and hosting workshops on things like keeping biases out of headlines and page layouts.

“The chance to uplift new and underrepresented voices is something that has always and will always be invaluable to The Observer, and so we are honored that Elizabeth Stone … [has established] this prize to support and embody that mission,” Sandholm said.

Working with The Observer was the most engaging part of her job at Fordham to date, Stone said. She fondly recalled the daylong barbecues she hosted for the staff as a sort of retreat, as well as tricky editorial questions that fostered “teachable moments,” she said, “where there was a really vital conversation, and where I was delighted not to be the one who knew everything.”

She is proud to have helped develop and strengthen the paper over the years and hopes the prize will help The Observer stay in step with the anti-racism and multicultural perspectives that are being amplified in the Fordham curriculum.

“I really do believe in a kind of multiculturalism, but to believe in it, you have to see it all around you,” she said. The prize, she said, is “a way of helping to realize that vision.”

To inquire about supporting the Many Voices Prize or another area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, a campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.

A QR code in a plastic holder sat in a prominent position on their table; visitors who scanned it were directed to an Instagram account for their group.

Their goal? Recruit Fordham students, faculty, and administrators to join First Gen Network, a group formed this semester to support students who are the first in their families to attend college. Since 2017, Nov. 8 has been celebrated as National First Generation Day.

“When I had to choose a college, it was during the pandemic, and it was so difficult because my parents didn’t really know much. It was a daunting process—picking schedules, learning about loans, and things like that,” said Stegmuller, a second-year Fordham College at Lincoln Center student.

The tabling event, which was also held at Rose Hill, was part of a kickoff for the group, which was convened in September by Tracyann Williams, Christie-Belle Garcia, and Marisa Villani, the assistant deans for student support and success at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, Fordham College at Rose Hill, and the Gabelli School of Business, respectively.

Stegmuller and Chen, a senior at the Gabelli School of Business, said they were attracted to the group, which is planning to hold a panel discussion in the spring because it offered connections to members of the community who they otherwise would never meet. Neither knew each other before joining the group.

Stegmuller said one of the things she’s come to appreciate is how many first-generation students have to overcome an inclination to do everything themselves.

“We’re just so used to doing everything on our own, so it’s good to have a group where we can reach out and learn to ask for help. When people are like ‘Oh, just go to office hours, or ask the dean for help,’ to us, it’s like, ‘No, I can do that myself,’” she said.

Nicole Varela, a first-year FCLC student, was one of the students who signed up to join the group. Her parents both attended college in El Salvador but never finished. She benefitted from the fact that her older brother went through the process two years before her.

“SATs, ACTs, college essays—I feel like people who know a lot more about that have an advantage, but we talked to people who knew the process, and they helped my brother through it.
“In this group, there are going to be a lot of different people with different experiences, but we all have one thing in common, so that’s nice.”

Students weren’t the only ones the group attracted.

Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., professor of English, joined because, she said, it’s important to provide a model for what’s possible for students, particularly those who, like her, were both the first to attend college and the first to become a professor.

“I think it’s important for people who may be interested in going into academia to realize there are people who came from the backgrounds that they came from who walked that road, and they can walk it too if they want to.”
First Gen is welcoming members of the Fordham community who are both first-generation students and those who want to support them. For more information, visit here or email [email protected].

Her career got off to a fast start. A college internship at Black Enterprise Magazine led to a full-time job at CNN and several freelance magazine assignments after she graduated from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 1997. By 25, she had sold her first novel to St. Martin’s Press. What should have been a wholly exciting time was mixed with turmoil.

“I thought I had to choose,” she says. “It was either my job at CNN or being an author; I told myself I couldn’t do both.”

So Reid quit her job and tried to make a living as an author. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Miami. And for a while things went well.

She created a lot of buzz around her third book, Marry Your Baby Daddy, a novel in which three sisters will inherit their grandmother’s fortune only if they marry the father of their children no more than six months after reading the will. In keeping with the theme of the novel, Reid started hosting Marry Your Baby Daddy Days—group weddings intended to promote two-parent homes in urban communities—which received plenty of media coverage, including interviews with major news outlets and the likes of Soledad O’Brien.

But “publicity didn’t pay the bills,” Reid says, and it became harder for her to support herself financially.

She decided she needed a reset. On a whim, she applied for a teaching position in the United Arab Emirates. She got the job.

From 2013 to 2014, Reid lived in Abu Dhabi, where she taught English to oil and steel industry employees and took the time to reconnect with herself. It was there that Reid says she realized “having a job is self-care,” because it allowed her to pursue her creative endeavors without having to worry about how she was going to support herself.

“Being there gave me time to be alone, but not lonely. To rest, to develop the discipline to work a 40-hour work week and also write. It gave me the space to reinvent myself and experiment with my ideas.”

On the weekends, Reid spent time with other women who had formed a local writers group, and she started working on a new novel, later published as This Life. She also joined an entrepreneurial women’s group in Dubai. “We would keep each other accountable, share ideas, and get feedback before going out to experiment,” Reid says.

In 2015, about a year after moving back to the United States, she found a local support network in the form of the Fordham community, which she reconnected with during a Yankees spring training event in Tampa, Florida. Now she’s a member of the Fordham University Alumni Association’s advisory board, focused on networking and engagement. She’s also a regular contributor to Forbes, where she has published articles on topics such as workplace diversity and wellness, and has been a content strategist at a major New York City-based investment bank.

“Fordham always felt like a community, always provided a safety net of support for me,” says Reid, who transferred to Fordham as a sophomore. She credits her professors for helping her develop her voice as a writer and says the University’s Jesuit culture made Fordham “a place where I could reflect and renew.”

“I knew I could always connect with people from my past and they would be a catalyst for my future,” she says. “Now I feel I can use the voice I developed there to add value and be a more active part of that community.” 

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
I am most passionate about growing my spiritual foundation and my connection to God. It’s not really a thing I do, it’s more of a feeling or listening thing. And I’m always trying to develop a more consistent discipline around that.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
My driving instructor told me to “stay in my lane,” and I followed that advice and now apply it to everything. It’s not that you have to choose either/or. But when I notice that I’m starting to get drained, I know then I’m doing too many things at once and I have to figure out what to focus on and finish. It helps maintain a sort of stability in my core so I can do both, so I can stay focused, so I can hold on to more in life.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
Being born and bred here, I’ve seen it all. I’m not fascinated by any place in New York City.

My favorite place in the world is poolside at the Shangri-La in Abu Dhabi. There’s a beautiful view of the Grand Mosque. And they have awesome pool service.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
The Writings of Florence Scovel Shinn. It’s a compilation of all her work. From her book, I learned how much power I have—not only as a woman but just being born, that being here makes me a powerful person, and I don’t need anything else. I read it in 2004, and looking back later on it reminded me that being in itself is enough, being born fulfilled my purpose, and I’m powerful because of that. That has brought me clarity and peace in some challenging situations.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
Elizabeth Stone. She’s a tough professor; she isn’t sugary and sweet. I liked that. She gave me good critiques, things to think about, good advice about my work. I trusted her opinion. And she helped me land that first internship, which helped me land my first published piece. She saw that I was talented and she trusted me enough to vouch for me. I will always remember that.

She took an unconventional approach to her admission essay—she wrote a fictional story about how Dionne Warwick and the Psychic Friends Network predicted she would go to a school that bears her last name. “This was a time when that show was big, and when there really wasn’t a Fordham presence in California,” the San Francisco-area native explains.

Her risk paid off, and she continued to hone her writing as a communications major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where she wrote for The Observer. She graduated in 2001.

“At Fordham I learned to tell really good stories,” she says, “about all sorts of topics, including things out of my comfort zone.” And though she didn’t end up pursuing a journalism career, her undergraduate experience helped get her a role as a grant writer for The Salvation Army in San Francisco. “I found a career I didn’t know existed, where I am able to help nonprofits and my community,” she says. “And that’s all from a journalism standpoint, which I owe to Fordham.”

It was also at the Salvation Army that Eva first thought about getting involved with a local Fordham alumni chapter. “My boss was very involved in his college’s alumni association, and it had just never occurred to me,” she says. So she contacted the head for the Fordham Alumni Chapter of Northern California, Mark Di Giorgio, and asked how she could help.

“Mark was a tremendous mentor who really kept Fordham grads in the area connected,” she says. When a job opportunity arose in Los Angeles, she promised she would get involved with the chapter in her new hometown.

Since her arrival in the city three years ago, she has done much more than that. With the help of a few fellow Fordham grads, she has revitalized the chapter, introducing two signature events.

She first connected with Caroline Valvardi, FCRH ’10, a “powerhouse behind group,” she says, who has since moved to Washington, D.C. Together, they brought on David Martel, FCLC ’00, and Kevin Carter, FCRH ’12. More recently, Lori Schaffhauser, LAW ’00, joined them. “It’s one of the most well-rounded teams I’ve ever worked with,” Eva says of her fellow Fordham Alumni Chapter of Los Angeles leaders. “It’s all ages, all different industries, all different types of talent. … It’s a great crowd, and they’re just happy to help. If this were corporate America, I would be really excited. And, of course, we’d love to have more.”

The group also reflects the diversity of the local Fordham audience. “LA is so vast; it’s just a different market,” she says. “But being here, we also have unique opportunities to leverage alumni in fields like entertainment. This is the entertainment town, and you don’t quite realize how many different aspects there are within that until you’re here.”

That’s why one of the chapter’s new signature events is a summer Entertainment Panel featuring Fordham grads who range from TV actors to Marvel writers. “It’s sold out both times we’ve held it,” Eva says, as has the new Malibu Wine Hike in the spring. Along with the annual LA Presidential Reception in January, these events have come to form the core of the chapter’s offerings for alumni.

“We’ve also tried baseball games, basketball games, holiday happy hours, all of that. We’re trying different locations and frequencies. It’s all trial and error to see what people here want,” Eva explains.

“This city is a bit fragmented, so I just look forward to linking this community together a bit more, to bringing more Fordham people together.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
I’m passionate about connecting people with organizations or communities or causes they care about that provide wellness for others, and about giving everyone access to opportunities they might not normally get. In my work, a lot of times that’s through philanthropy, like raising funds for after-school programs for children from low-income backgrounds. They provide more than education—they also provide health and wellness support. Nobody operates at their full capacity without having access to basic needs like nutrition, education, and mental health. So I’m passionate about providing access to that, but I’m also passionate about giving donors an opportunity to see how their contributions really make a difference by hosting community events.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
A former CEO I worked with, who was such an inspirational man, once shared a definition of disillusionment that has stuck with me. He said that disillusionment is what happens when you walk into a situation with an illusion of how it should be. Since then, I have made an effort to address most things in life with an open mind and not with preconceived notions that can lead to disappointment. It’s hard, but it works.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
My favorite places in New York City are the Lower East Side, West Village, or anywhere south of 14th Street, places like the original Five Points neighborhood, where real old New York is and where New York came into being. When I lived in New York right after college, I had a book that listed all these historic spots. And I would take the train with this book and wander around and just start marking off places. Lower Manhattan is just rich with history.

In the world, I would say Paris. I just went for my birthday earlier this year, and I hadn’t been since I was 11 or 12. There’s a ton of history there too, of course, which is perfect for me. Renoir is my favorite artist, and his studio there is now a museum, which I got to see on this last trip. I just loved tripping around the cobblestone streets and the old shops in that hilly area near the basilica, finding the oldest restaurant and the oldest bar and the oldest of everything.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
There’s a book I read a few months ago that I think will stay with me for a long time. It’s called The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling, and it’s by Stephen Cope. It’s a little self-help, in a way, but what I really enjoyed is how he tells a lot of tremendous stories about people who really followed their passion. I especially loved the stories about Jane Goodall and Gandhi, those two stuck out to me. There was so much I didn’t know about their lives or why they chose to do what they did. Understanding why they made these conscious decisions was inspiring.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
I would say Elizabeth Stone, who founded and ran The Observer at Lincoln Center for a long time. She was a big supporter. She encouraged me to push the envelope a few times, to take difficult articles even if they might not get published, and even though it sometimes frustrated me at the time, I am so grateful for that opportunity that helped me learn so much. I took writing classes with her too, but it’s one thing when you’re in a class and you’re writing papers—working on a newspaper is a totally different thing. You’re on a team with everybody. You’ve got co-writers, you have an editor … it’s real life. And that was an opportunity that I wouldn’t have taken advantage of if she hadn’t pushed me in that direction.

But how does one take creative license on characters that actually exist? Or embellish events that history has crystallized? Or brave the intellectual and emotional honesty that memoirs pledge?

Five Fordham professors and published memoirists took up these difficult questions during a reading and panel discussion, “The Art of the Memoir,” held May 1 at the Lincoln Center campus.

Moderated by Susan Kamil, publisher of Random House and Dial Press imprints, the panel featured:

•    Mary Bly, Ph.D., professor of English;
•    Richard Giannone, Ph.D., professor emeritus of English;
•    Eve Keller, Ph.D., professor of English and director of graduate studies;
•    Kim Dana Kupperman, writer-in-residence; and
•    Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., professor of English.

Several panelists admitted that they had no experience in the genre of memoir before attempting their own. Bly, who writes under the pseudonym Eloisa James, said her sole intention of writing Paris in Love (Random House, 2012), a memoir of her sabbatical year in Paris, was “not to remember, but be present.”

“My mother died of ovarian cancer and I was diagnosed with cancer two weeks later,” Bly said of her impetus to go abroad with her family. “So we left. We went to Paris. We sold our house, we sold our cars—we ran away from home. And what I wanted to do was not forget.”

According to Bly, the book, which is currently #26 on the New York Times bestseller nonfiction list, served to bring together her memories of the year and her reconciliation with the events leading up to it.

Giannone, whose recent retirement was celebrated at the event, had different reasons to write Hidden: Reflections on Gay Life, AIDS, and Spiritual Desire (Fordham University Press, 2012). The book chronicles his transformation from a solitary gay academic during the burgeoning AIDS crisis, to the primary caregiver of his dying mother and sister.

According to Giannone, the memoir represents the class of “ordinariness.”

“These reflections tell of northern New Jersey Italian-Americans,” Giannone said. “The world is not that of ‘The Jersey Shore’ or Rick Santorum, but of plain people plugging away in domestic obscurity, surely dullness to most—plugging their way out of immigrant, blue collar status.”

Primarily a scholar, Giannone said the memoir was a “radical upheaval.” While his scholarly articles and books have forced him to confront the limits of the mind, Hidden required him to confront the limits of the heart.

Two Rings: A Story of Love and War (PublicAffairs, 2012) was a collaboration between Keller and Millie Werber, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor. Werber was 16 when she married Heniek Greenspan, who was killed in Auschwitz soon after their marriage. Despite her own arrest and imprisonment in Auschwitz, Werber saved a single tattered photograph of her husband along with their two wedding rings.

Eve Keller (right) talks with Mary Bly (left) and moderater Susan Kamil. Photo by Chris Taggart

Keller said she spent a year with Werber before being able to imagine herself in Werber’s role and intuit her thoughts and feelings.

“The result of the imaging… made me think about my own life, too,” Keller said. “Trying to envision a small act of kindness for example… required me to think about kindness itself. What comprises it? What categorizes it? What is entailed in committing such an act in the midst of horror?

“I found myself writing about the past of one person in a way that I wanted to resonate beyond that person, too,” she continued. “In a way that might prompt readers, as it surely prompted me, to think about the largest things in life—love, hate, cruelty, fear, faith, and all the rest.”

Kupperman’s memoir, the award-winning I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence (Grayworld, 2010), is a collection of autobiographical, personal, and lyric essays ranging from her mother’s suicide to the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

For Kupperman, the key element of any memoir is the development of the narrator’s persona. Often a façade rather than a transparent window into the narrator, the persona testifies to the various masks that the author herself wears.

“The narrator is simply the first layer of what we might call the nonfictive veil used by the essayist or novelist,” Kupperman said. “Sometimes I think of [a persona]as the memes that live inside me, the personalities I can conjure in the way actors can pull from their inner beings, selves that are both unrecognizable and deeply familiar.”

Stone’s two memoirs evince the diversity of the genre itself. In 2010, she helped Dina Matos McGreevey write her memoir Silent Partner (Hyperion, 2010) about her marriage to former New Jersey governor James McGreevey.

Her own first memoir, A Boy I Once Knew: What a Teacher Learned from her Student (Algonquin, 2002), tells the story of her student, Vincent, who left Stone his diaries and asked her to write about him following his death from AIDS.

Stone said that the memoir has progressed, historically, to include more than 58 categories, ranging in topics from academic life to war.

“No longer are autobiographies limited to the white warriors of statesmen,” she said. “The autobiographies that have become canonical in the last 30 years are the autobiographies of ‘nobodies’,” she said, referencing stories of immigrants, ex-mental patients, and the children of blue-collar workers.

Despite the variety of their works, the panelists said that the common element to their craft is “messiness,” that is, the fact that composing a memoir is a lengthy and often painful process.

“The process is like a mole banging up against a wall,” Stone said lightheartedly. “Memoirs have a final gracefulness that has nothing to do with the process.”

The event was sponsored by Fordham’s Creative Writing program, the Deans of Arts and Sciences, and PublicAffairs Books.

The service will be held at 4 p.m. in the Lowenstein Center chapel on the Lincoln Center campus.

Lamb, an associate professor of English, died on March 22 from acute leukemia.

“Mimi Lamb was a gracious, creative and fascinating person who shared so many different gifts with the college over 35 years,” said Robert Grimes, S.J., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC).

The oldest of seven children, Lamb was born on March 6, 1936, in Grand Forks, N.D. and grew up in the nearby farming town of Michigan City. Following high school, she attended Vassar College, earning a bachelor of arts in English in 1958.

After graduation, Lamb moved to New York City, where she attended New York University, earning an master of arts in film in 1965 and a doctorate in drama in 1976. That same year, Fordham hired her as an assistant professor of English.

She was promoted to associate professor in 1983.

Eva Stadler-Brooks, Ph.D., professor emirita of English, recalled Lamb as a “great colleague and wonderful friend,” someone who played an important role in the development of the creative writing and media studies curriculum at FCLC during her 35-year teaching career.

Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., professor of English, communication and media studies, remembered Lamb as an artist, author, essayist and playwright who gave unstinting support to fellow faculty and students in all of their creative endeavors.

“She was at once voracious and discerning in her appetite for what others, especially her colleagues, produced,” Stone said. “You wrote a book? She read it. You put on a play? She came. You gave a recital? She showed up. And it wasn’t because she was being polite. She was really curious.

“Although she had impeccable taste, she almost always had something generous to say,” she added. “I think that’s pretty rare.”

A versatile writer, Lamb was the author of a mystery novel, Chains of Gold (Ballantine, 1986) and the theatre text Antony and Cleopatra on the English Stage (Farleigh Dickenson University Press, 1981). She published a repertoire of academic essays, short stories and plays, including “Monkey Music,” produced by the Pan Asian Repertory at La Mama.

She held membership in the Phi Beta Kappa Society and was a recipient of three Academy of American Poets awards.

Those interested in attending and/or speaking at the memorial service can RSVP here.

In its annual newspaper contest, the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) chose The Observer as the second-place finisher in the category of best all-around non-daily student newspaper for region 1.

The Observer won two more regional SPJ awards:
• third place in general sports writing category for Rob Beatson’s article, “Basketball Coach, Top Scorer, Gone from Rose Hill.”
• third place in sports column writing category for Ashley WennersHerron’s “Strange Sports” column.

“The dedication and persistence in producing a top-notch publication has paid off,” said WennersHerron,The Observer’s editor in chief and a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. “The Society of Professional Journalists awards reflect the hard work that The Observer staff continuously puts into the paper.”

The regional awards were announced on April 10. First-place regional finishers go on to compete against each other in a national competition.

Adding to the list of accolades, The Observer won second place for general excellence in the New York Press Association’s 2009 Better Newspaper Contest. It was among 12 students newspapers at New York colleges and universities competing for the prize.

Finally, the paper was named a finalist for the ACP Online Pacemaker Award. Winners will be announced this September.

“The Observer editorial board and reporters have every reason to feel very proud, now that college journalism organizations have confirmed the excellence of the paper overall, the online multimedia and individual sports articles,” said Elizabeth Stone, The Observer’s faculty adviser.

This is the second set of awards that have come to the Lincoln Center campus newspaper this spring. It won second place in the category of “non-weekly four-year university paper” on Feb. 28 in the Best of Show Contest at the Midwinter National College Newspaper Convention.

The Observer also won first place in the category of “multimedia package contest” for “A Second Look: More Stops Along the 7 Train” by online editor P.J. Williams, a senior.

The newspaper also won first place in the category of “multimedia package contest” for “A Second Look: More Stops Along the 7 Train” by online editor P.J. Williams, a senior.

“The Observer has won so many awards in recent years, it is easy to forget that each year brings new leadership and new challenges,” said Robert Grimes, S.J., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center. “This year’s staff deserves special praise, not only for the award in a traditional journalistic category, but even more so for its first award in a multimedia category, clearly the wave of the future.”

“I could not be more proud of The Observer’s staff,” said editor in chief Ashley WennersHerron, a senior. “After a particularly difficult year, it’s lovely to have recognition for the hard work our talented editors and writers put into every aspect of the newspaper.”

Adviser Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., professor of English and communications and media studies, noted that the newspaper’s staff was acutely aware of the enormous changes that are underway in journalism, and have adapted accordingly.

“This year The Observer editorial board made the decision to move forward and concentrate on online multimedia. I’m very proud of the entire editorial board and its collaborative and cooperative action,” she said.

The Observer took first place in Best of Show in 2008 and 2009, and 10th place for Best Website in 2009. In 2007, The Observer won an honorable mention in Best of Show.

The Midwinter National College Newspaper Convention is sponsored by the Associate Collegiate Press.

The announcement was made on Sunday, March 2 at the ACP’s 2008 National College Newspaper Conference in San Francisco, Calif. The prize comes one year after The Observer won an honorable mention in the same category, and is one of several awards the newspaper has won in recent years.

“I’m absolutely thrilled that we won,” said Jennie Nau, editor in chief. “Our staff has worked extremely hard this year and I’m pleased that our efforts have paid off.”

The Observer is the student newspaper of Fordham College at Lincoln Center. It is produced entirely by a non-paid student staff on a bi-weekly basis and is advised by Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., professor of English and communications. The Observer was first published in 1981 and continues to provide a student voice within the Fordham community.

The Observer’s layout team redesigned the paper last summer, which Stone noted as a reason for the win. “I’m delighted that this year’s editors and writers have maintained The Observer’s tradition of editorial excellence. We are now first in the nation in our category—and not just in the top half dozen—because layout and photography are now as strong as editorial,” she said.

“Our reporters, section editors and layout staff are the true stars of The Observer,” said Anthony Hazell, the paper’s outgoing editor-in-chief, a Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) junior majoring in communication and media studies. “They come up with the content and the visuals. … I just have the pleasure of previewing their work and making sure it gets out to the community.”

The Observer has now been recognized a total of nine times since the 2002-2003 academic year. Other recent awards include first-place honors in the New York Press Association’s (NYPA) 2005 Better College Newspaper Contest for the sports columns of Joe DeLessio, a 2006 FCLC graduate. This marked the third consecutive year in which the NYPA recognized The Observer’swork.

“The Observer staff developed a very strong work ethic, and are very talented,” said faculty adviser Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., professor of English, communication and media studies at Fordham. “The culture of The Observer is increasingly bent on thorough and sophisticated reporting.”

In October 2005, former editor-in-chief Corinne Iozzio (FCLC ’05) won The Chronicle of Higher Education’s David W. Miller Award for Student Journalists. She received the award for three articles that were printed in The Observer in fall 2004 and spring 2005. The paper also took second place in the Associated Collegiate Press’ 2005 Newspaper of the Year contest and first place in the American Scholastic Press Association’s 2005 Newspaper Review.