Awards and Special Mention

Peninsula College English professor Carmen Germain and Art professor Michael Paul Miller have just been awarded the top prizes for poetry and art in a Washington state literary and art journal, Crosscurrents. Germain won for her poem entitled, “Husband Wooing,” and Miller received his award for his painting, “The Calling.”  

Crosscurrents is published annually by the Washington Community College Humanities Association (WCCHA) and recognizes the work of humanities faculty from across the state.

Other Peninsula College faculty who are published in the journal include English professors Alice Derry, Jim Fisher and Michael Calvin Mills. During the special awards ceremony, held at the organization’s annual conference, Peninsula College’s literary and art journal, Tidepools, received an Honorary Mention in the campus literary magazine category. Also at the conference, Peninsula College English and film professor Bruce Hattendorf was elected second vice president of WCCHA.

WCCHA provides active support for Humanities instruction throughout the Washington Community College System and maintains a forum for the examination of the role, purpose and value Humanities provide in academic and professional settings.

Carmen Germain, who teaches English at Peninsula College, was on academic sabbatical in 2007-2008. In February, she was in residence at the American Academy in Rome as a Visiting Artist where she worked on a manuscript as well as researched the work of the Roman writer Elsa Morante.

Michael Paul Miller is an emerging artist in the contemporary art world who originated from the heartland of Wisconsin. Miller's postmodern symbolist paintings explore the depths of the human condition and the impotent psyche of modernity set in a post-apocalyptic environment, which offers limited exhausted resources and poses new challenges to the few survivors and objects that remain known as, The Salvaged. Miller teaches at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, WA as a tenure-track professor of art.