Professor Lisa Titus, a faculty member at SUNY Sullivan, has been honored with the prestigious Chancellor’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities. This accolade comes in recognition of her debut poetry collection, “First Time, Every Time,” which was published on December 25, 2023, and was a finalist for the 2021 Brick Road Poetry Competition.
“I am honored to be recognized by my colleagues and the administration for my accomplishment,” said Professor Titus. Her work has been praised for transforming the mundane into the mythic, with Jason Irwin, author of The History of Our Vagrancies, describing the collection as “feral and alive like the hot breath of birth,” noting its playfulness, humor, and devotion to craft.
Louisa Lam, collaborator on Asian American Modernism with Abang-guard, added, “First Time, Every Time is a ride-along with an earth goddess disguised as a bartender, poet, mother, lover, and teacher. Tactile, nervy, sticky, glimmering, and foreboding, Titus is incapable of spinning without belief, incanting, manifesting and celebrating the flawed and feckless life of the loving and well-loved.”
Professor Titus has been a dedicated faculty member at SUNY Sullivan for 20 years, receiving the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2015. Her tenure at the college is marked by her commitment to both her students and her craft.
In addition to her academic and literary achievements, Professor Titus has an impressive list of accolades, including serving as the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Sullivan County, NY, receiving a 2021-2022 DVAA Individual Artist Fellowship, and being nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been featured in various esteemed publications such as Barrow Street, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Packingtown Review.
Professor Titus continues to enrich the literary and academic community from her home in Sullivan County, New York, where she balances her roles as a bartender, teacher, and poet.
