Back when she was a Bates student, Associate Professor of English Jessica (Jess) Anthony ’96 participated in her first workshop — a hallmark of creative writing classrooms that calls for responding to one another’s drafts in an open discussion — in Senior Lecturer Emeritus Robert Farnsworth’s poetry class. Opening her talk on Sept. 30 as one of the winners of the Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, Anthony said that those early days at Bates shaped her and continue to influence her teaching. “It’s Rob’s model that I continue to bring into the workshop every year,” said Anthony.

The Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, supported by the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Endowed Fund, is given each year to honor “outstanding performance as a teacher,” which includes “stimulating student interest in the subject and fostering a desire for further learning,” said President Garry W. Jenkins during his introduction to Anthony’s lecture and reading. 

Candidates for the award, named after Robert Kroepsch ’33, L.L.D. ’71, are nominated by current students and alumni from the past five years, and a committee of recent award recipients selects the winner. Two winners were selected for 2026-2027 — Jess Anthony ’96 and Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Jon Cavallero, who will give his talk later this year. 

Kroepsch honors what is “fundamental to Bates,” said Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty Joanne Roberts. “It recognizes and centers what is really most important to us here in our teaching. And it’s really appropriate, I think, that today we will celebrate and hear from the product of a Bates education. We’re so fortunate that she chose to make Lewiston home for her own teaching and to return to us here at Bates.”

Anthony’s talk offered an overview of how she came to write The Most, published in 2024 by Little, Brown, and Co. The Most was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Prix Fitzgerald and the Clark Fiction Prize. Set in 1957 and taking place over one day, Anthony’s novel was named one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 and one of the The Washington Post’s Best Books of 2024​. In April, Anthony was one of three Mainers to win a Guggenheim Fellowship.

“One would think that, given all that she dedicates to her craft, she wouldn’t have time to also be a great teacher,” Roberts said, acknowledging Anthony’s many accolades. “Yet here we are celebrating her as a recipient of Bates’ most distinguished award for teaching.”

Anthony used her talk to pull back the curtain on her writing process for The Most, explaining that the seed of the book idea was planted back in 2010 when she was an Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop for a year and read a newspaper article about a man who refused to get out of a swimming pool. Anthony stored away that little “kernel of information” until she was invited to a most unusual artistic residency in 2017. The Bridge Guard residency gives artists a place to practice their work in rural Slovakia but also asks something of them: “To guard a bridge by making art. The act of creation prevents acts of fascism,” Anthony told the group gathered for the Kroepsch talk. “Now this may sound like a wild endeavor and indeed it was.”

Anthony was assigned to guard the Mária Valéria Bridge between Štúrovo, Slovakia, and Esztergom, Hungary. It was there, as she was working toward a book that would capture a marriage at a “precipice,” that the kernel planted in Iowa emerged. “I recollected that little article that I read in Iowa seven years earlier, and I started thinking about it: what would it mean to not want to get out of the pool?” she said.

At the foot of the bridge in Slovakia, Anthony spent hours watching 1950s film footage from the Delaware Public Archives and listening to popular American music of that era. Anthony said she struggled to get started writing the novel, but her answer eventually came through a focus on form, when she determined to “create an entire life in a single day.”

The novel, which moves between two primary narrators offering sometimes contradictory perspectives, begins with her main character, Kathleen Beckett, waking up and going for a swim in the pool of her apartment complex, and closes near the end of the day, after most families have had dinner and are gathered around their television sets, while Kathleen remains in the swimming pool. Anthony read from the first few chapters to give a sense of these multiple voices, the pacing, and the setting. 

During her talk, Anthony expressed gratitude to the Bates faculty who helped her reach this moment, including Farnsworth, who passed away in 2024. 

“I think this is an appropriate moment to formally acknowledge the labor that all of my former faculty here at Bates gave to me,” Anthony said. She pointed to Associate Professor of English Sanford Freedman, seated in the second row. “I took, I believe, three courses in English with Sanford. The first two were Shakespeare and the third was a course on critical theory. And I think finally, Sanford, you gave me the A minus in critical theory. I remain very grateful to you for that.” 

Faculty Featured

Jessica L. Anthony

Associate Professor of English