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NACC Creative Writing Student Leaves
Impact
An illuminating smile. A calmness of presence that soothed those
around her. A courageous pursuit of knowledge. A loveliness of
language each time her pen touched the page.
The memory of deceased Northeast Alabama Community College
student and Dawson resident Deborah Stevenson has held strong
among those who knew her at the college. Her accomplishments as
a student will also endure
when her writing is honored at a national gathering of college
honors students next month and when her diploma is issued
posthumously in May at the college’s annual graduation ceremony.
Stevenson, a 44-year-old mother of three, was in her final
semester of coursework at NACC when she died in a fatal car
wreck in December. Just before her death, she submitted one
short story and one work of creative nonfiction that she
produced while an NACC student to Sigma Tau Delta’s national
annual writing contest.
Both were among the few chosen to be read
aloud at the organization’s annual conference in Louisville next
month, where 800 students are expected to convene. Stevenson’s
was the only community college submission to earn this national
honor this year.
“I’ve been teaching for thirty-plus years, and I’ve never taught
a student with as much talent as a writer as Deborah,” said Joan
Reeves, the chair of NACC’s Department of English and Fine Arts.
Reeves will travel to the convention in March with eight
students and read the work on her former student’s behalf. It
was Reeves who also coordinated between Stevenson’s family and
college officials to ensure that the credits Stevenson
accumulated resulted in a formal diploma.
Stevenson’s writing often celebrated the beauty and culture of
the Sand Mountain area. Her winning nonfiction piece “Dye by the
Bottle,” which she wrote for a creative-writing class during the
fall 2007 NACC semester, humorously recounts her pre-dawn
encounter with a skunk and her failed attempts to detach the
skunk’s odor from her skin while her children watched from the
sidelines. “I think, perhaps,” she writes, “a full bottle of
apple cider vinegar dumped on the head and spread over the body
smells worse than skunk.”
Stevenson’s post-graduation plans were to pursue state
certification to teach middle- and high-school English. Not only
did her name consistently appear on NACC’s President’s List for
academic excellence, she co-edited the college’s literary
magazine Aurora last year, which publishes the art and writing
of NACC students.
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Like so many NACC students who
return to pursue a career later in life, Stevenson
juggled the demands of home, motherhood and a full load
of courses with grace. “Deborah managed to do it all,”
Reeves said. “She was a conscientious student, very
determined to do a good job at school, but at the same
time, it was obvious to me that her children were always
her top priority.”
After Stevenson’s death, Reeves
guided her former students’ graduation paperwork through
the proper channels to ensure a diploma would be issued
in her name. Reeves said she will be honored to share
Stevenson’s writing with the audience at the Louisville
convention. “I was convinced that I would be going to a
bookstore one day and asking Deborah to sign my copy of
her published book.” |
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