Booker T. Anthony
Fayetteville State University
Professor Booker T. Anthony's students continue to remember his influence on their academic, career and personal lives. "His enthusiasm and classroom energy was infectious," remembers a Student Professor Anthony taught fifteen years ago. "His influence on my academic life changed the trajectory of my college career and ultimately my future." Another student writes, "More impressing is how Dr. Anthony continues to be available for me long after my departure from Fayetteville State University." Students say that "Dr. Anthony's classes are both dreaded and anticipated by students who know that he is demanding, but who also know that he is dedicated to helping them learn." While students acknowledge that Professor Anthony's classes are challenging and difficult, they "overwhelmingly proclaim him as a favorite professor for the level of mastery they walk away with and the assistance that he so lovingly provides."
On campus, Professor Anthony is known as the "explicator" man, a phrase English majors created approximately ten years ago. In every literature class, Professor Anthony requires students to write three one page, single-spaced explicators on American or English literature writers. Students cannot use secondary criticism. The writing exercise prepares students to write critically about literature prior to doing research writing that requires secondary sources. Many a former student, once becoming an English teacher, has copied Professor Anthony's explicator requirement. One graduate student says, "After Dr. Anthony's explicators, I felt emboldened to tackle any graduate paper."
Since joining the Department of English in 1986, Professor Anthony has taught mainly at the undergraduate level; however, his students have presented papers at national language conferences; completed graduate degree programs around the country; have established themselves as educators and professionals in school systems, universities, and corporations across the country. As another student writes, "Dr. Anthony's professional yet unpretentious, practical approach to education attracted me, a non-teaching English major, to the field of education."
Professor Anthony's passion for teaching and scholarly research was recognized in 2208 when he was nominated by his peers at Fayetteville State University's Teacher of the Year award. One colleague writes, "I have sat in Dr. Anthony's classes and evaluated him both as a peer and a chair on numerous occasions over the past twenty years. Sitting in his classes and watching him in action I have been more than impressed by his rapport with his students, the breadth of his knowledge and the pedagogical structure he creates: I always learn something when I visit him."
Professor Anthony is an excellent model for his students. In 2006, he was nominated to a two-year term as president of the national College Language Association. In 2007, he was selected to participate in the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Visiting Scholars Program in Princeton, New Jersey. He has served as College Board Advanced Placement Reader (Table Leader) of English literature for the past twenty years. Since 1990, he has been a Road Scholar of the North Carolina Humanities Council's Speaker's Bureau, where he presents statewide lectures on spirituality and religion in literature, as well as the Bible in literature. He publishes regularly on the fiction of Ernest J. Gains.
An ordained Baptist minister and local pastor, Professor Anthony earned his baccalaureate degree at St. Augustine's College and his master's degree and doctorate in English from The Ohio State University. He participated in Harvard Graduate School's Education's Management Development Program and has a Certificate of Achievement from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities Millennium Leadership Institute. He is married and has two teenage sons.