Photo by: Justin Edmonds

As recognition for her work, Professor Margaret Whitt was

recently co-awarded the United Methodist Church’s University Scholar and Teacher of the year Award.

This award is given to professors who demonstrate outstanding scholarship, teaching and overall contribution to the university community.

As an active faculty member, Whitt has written several books, including an anthology titled A Civil Mind, Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement. She is currently working on compiling an anthology of short stories about HIV/AIDS.

B Whitt has been teaching for 40 years, and this fall marks her 21st year as an educator at the University of Denver.

She is currently teaching the freshmen First Year Seminar: Thinking of Home and a Civil Rights CORE class titled, the Long Walk toward Justice. In class she engages her students in class discussions, creative projects, and telling interesting personal stories in class that connect to the text being discussed. However, this will be her last year teaching, she is retiring in the spring.

Students including Aaron Schwarzberg will miss her when she is gone

“Anyone whols lucky enough to five minutes around Margaret Whitt falls in love with her charm and sincincerity,” he explained. “The legacy that she has left will last a lifetime.”

But her learning won’t stop there. Whitt plans to continue to write and travel to famous homes and gravesites of literary authors and significant locations where civil rights events once took place.

She will settle in her home in Gerton, North Carolina in the community of Upper Hickory Nut Gorge.

She wishes to do volunteer work for a literacy program, read for the blind or even scoop ice cream!

Whitt ends her years of teaching by saying, “I have loved my years at DU, and now it is time, as my first-year seminar class and Thoreau have taught me, to put a boat out on the pond, climb aboard, and see what random shore I might run up on!”