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NELL ALTIZER Nell Altizer, poet and Emerita Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, died at her Port Townsend, Washington home on June 14, 2015. She was 78 years old. Nell was born on September 13, 1936, in Charleston, West Virginia. She received her BA in English from St. Louis University in 1957, and an MA in English from Emory University in 1962. After several years as a lecturer in the College Writing Program at the University of California, Berkeley, where she won the Distinguished Teaching Award, the campus' most prestigious honor for teaching, she began in 1974 her twenty-eight year career in the English department of UH Manoa. Thanks to her growing reputation as a poet and her work in the field of English composition, Nell rose through the ranks of the faculty, from Instructor to full Professor, served as director of the Creative Writing Program, and retired in 2002. Most notable of her many publications were the influential Heath Handbook of English Composition and the Heath Workbook of Composition; a volume of poetry, The Man Who Died En Route, which won the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press; and a sonnet sequence set in Ireland, Thin Place. Her essays, reviews, and poems have appeared in prestigious journals like Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Manoa, The Prairie Schooner, and The Massachusetts Review. During her years as a UH Manoa faculty member, she was the recipient of numerous awards for her teaching, her writing, and her contributions to the literature of Hawai'i. She received the UH Manoa President's Citation for Excellence in Teaching in 1986, the Cades Award for Literature from the Hawai'i Literary Arts Council (HLAC) in 1992, and the Hawai'i Award for Literature from the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and HLAC in 2001. She is survived by her daughters Maude Samaniego (Bito) of Oakland, California, and Sara Acacio (Rowell) of Tacoma, Washington, her three granddaughters, Gemma, Autumn, and Zoe, as well as her sister, Jane McCaleb, and her brother, Thomas J.J. Altizer. The UH Manoa English department will host a poetry reading in her honor on Thursday, October 15 at 3 pm in Kuykendall 410.\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NELL ALTIZER Nell Altizer, poet and Emerita Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, died at her Port Townsend, Washington home on June 14, 2015. She was 78 years old. Nell was born on September 13, 1936, in Charl…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":371,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-placed-obituaries"],"yoast_head":"\n