June 3, 2004

Faculty honors

Reginald Gibbons — poet, editor, fiction writer and professor of English — has been named the winner of the 2004 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize. The prize carries a cash award of $10,000.

Given annually by the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Hardison Prize is the only major American prize honoring a poet for excellence in both poetry and teaching. It is among the top poetry prizes in the country.

In awarding the prize, poet Michael Collier, one of three prize judges, noted that “Gibbons has accomplished already more than what two or three people combined might normally accomplish.” In particular, he cited Gibbons’ tenure from 1981 to 1997 as editor of TriQuarterly, the international journal of new writing, art and cultural inquiry published at Northwestern.

Gibbons also has won the John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Balcones Poetry Award, the Carl Sandburg Award, and other prizes for poetry. His first and only novel, “Sweetbitter,” was awarded the 1995 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the 1995 Jesse Jones fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters.

The prize is named in honor of poet O.B. Hardison Jr., who directed the Folger Shakespeare Library from 1969 through 1984.

The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society has chosen Ishwar Radhakrishnan, assistant professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology, to receive its Scholar Award in recognition of his research accomplishments.

Radhakrishnan’s research interests are in the areas of structural biology and informatics, with emphasis on transcription regulation and monoubiquitin signaling. He is attempting to clarify the structural and thermodynamic basis of protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions that regulate the assembly and recruitment of molecular machines which perform complex functions in the cell.

The March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation awarded Radhakrishnan a Basil O’Connor Starter Scholarship in 2001. At Northwestern he is a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehen-sive Cancer Center of Northwestern University and the Center for Genetic Medicine.