{"id":174513,"date":"2026-10-08T12:21:39","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T16:21:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=174513"},"modified":"2026-10-08T15:10:16","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T19:10:16","slug":"associate-professor-of-english-jess-anthony-96-wins-kroepsch-award-for-excellence-in-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2026\/10\/08\/associate-professor-of-english-jess-anthony-96-wins-kroepsch-award-for-excellence-in-teaching\/","title":{"rendered":"Associate Professor of English Jess Anthony \u201996 delivers annual Kroepsch Award talk"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back when she was a Bates student, Associate Professor of English Jessica (Jess) Anthony \u201996 participated in her first workshop \u2014 a hallmark of creative writing classrooms that calls for responding to one another\u2019s drafts in an open discussion \u2014 in Senior Lecturer Emeritus Robert Farnsworth\u2019s 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. \u201cIt\u2019s Rob’s model that I continue to bring into <\/strong>the workshop every year,\u201d said Anthony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"teacher
Associate Professor of English Jessica Anthony ’96 spoke about and read from her latest novel The Most <\/em>on Sept. 30. Anthony is one of two winners of the Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching this year. (Theophil Syslo\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, supported by the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Endowed Fund, is given each year to honor \u201coutstanding performance as a teacher,\u201d which includes \u201cstimulating student interest in the subject and fostering a desire for further learning,\u201d said President Garry W. Jenkins during his introduction to Anthony\u2019s lecture and reading. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Candidates for the award, named after Robert Kroepsch \u201933, L.L.D. \u201971, 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 \u2014 Jess Anthony \u201996 and Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Jon Cavallero, who will give his talk later this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kroepsch honors what is \u201cfundamental to Bates,\u201d said Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty Joanne Roberts. \u201cIt recognizes and centers what is really most important to us here in our teaching. And it\u2019s really appropriate, I think, that today we will celebrate and hear from the product of a Bates education. We\u2019re so fortunate that she chose to make Lewiston home for her own teaching and to return to us here at Bates.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthony\u2019s talk offered an overview of how she came to write The Most,<\/em> published in 2024 by Little, Brown, and Co. The Most<\/em> 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\u2019s novel was named one of Time<\/em>\u2019s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 and one of the The Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s Best Books of 2024\u200b. In April, Anthony was one of three Mainers to win a Guggenheim Fellowship<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"teacher
Associate Professor of English Jess Anthony extends her thanks to Associate Professor of English Sanford Freedman at the Kroepsch Award lecture on Sept. 30.(Theophil Syslo\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne would think that, given all that she dedicates to her craft, she wouldn’t have time to also be a great teacher,\u201d Roberts said, acknowledging Anthony\u2019s many accolades. \u201cYet here we are celebrating her as a recipient of Bates\u2019 most distinguished award for teaching.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthony used her talk to pull back the curtain on her writing process for The Most<\/em>, 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 \u201ckernel of information\u201d 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: \u201cTo guard a bridge by making art. The act of creation prevents acts of fascism,\u201d Anthony told the group gathered for the Kroepsch talk. \u201cNow this may sound like a wild endeavor and indeed it was.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthony was assigned to guard the <\/a>M\u00e1ria Val\u00e9ria Bridge between <\/a>\u0160t\u00farovo, Slovakia, and <\/a>Esztergom, Hungary. It was there, as she was working toward a book that would capture a marriage at a \u201cprecipice,\u201d that the kernel planted in Iowa emerged. \u201cI 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?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201ccreate an entire life in a single day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"audience
The audience, including Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty Joanne Roberts (left), listens to Associate Professor of English Jess Anthony’s Kroepsch lecture. (Theophil Syslo\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During her talk, Anthony expressed gratitude to the Bates faculty who helped her reach this moment, including Farnsworth, who passed away in 2024. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think this is an appropriate moment to formally acknowledge the labor that all of my former faculty here at Bates gave to me,\u201d Anthony said. She pointed to Associate Professor of English Sanford Freedman, seated in the second row. \u201cI 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.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Associate Professor of English Jess Anthony ’96 gave a lecture for her Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching on Sept. 30. She discussed and read from her most recent novel, The Most.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1917,"featured_media":174520,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":["jessica-l-anthony"],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"bates_author_byline_override":"","_estimated-read-time":"","_post-template":"\/usr\/local\/webserver\/webpve\/htdocs\/new-www.bates.edu\/wp-content\/themes\/b\/news\/single-big-header-image.php","_header-color":"","_photo-credit":"","_header-effect":"","override_related_with_tag":"","_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-batesnews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1917"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174513"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174590,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174513\/revisions\/174590"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}