LOYALTY TO BUCKNELL AWARD
Joann Golightly Brown ’48: The 1948 Class Reporter for the last 70 years, Brown has attended every Reunion since graduation and is a perennial volunteer for her Reunion committee. She established a scholarship in memory of her late sister, Eleanor Golightly McChesney ’46, and annually attends the Scholarship Day Luncheon to meet the recipient. After graduation, Brown worked at the Newark office of the FBI, where she met her husband, Jim. In 1957 they launched the insurance agency James A. Brown Agency Inc. in Roselle Park, N.J., where she was the office manager and bookkeeper for 58 years.
Outstanding Achievement in a Chosen Profession Award
James A. Geiling ’78: Geiling served 25 years in the Army’s Medical Corps, including tours in Germany, Ukraine and Bosnia-Herzegovina. After retiring as a colonel in 2003, he became chief of medicine at the VA Medical Center in White River Junction, Vt., until 2017. He is an intensivist and hospitalist and a professor of medicine at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. An avid volunteer, he worked in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and spends a month each year as a consulting physician in critical care and emergency medicine at the Arusha Lutheran Medical Centre in Tanzania.
Peter Balakian ’73: The author of seven books of poems, Balakian won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Ozone Journal. For more than four decades, his poems have engaged a wide range of social, cultural and political realities including genocide, war, terrorism, climate change, and the AIDS epidemic. The Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities, professor of English and director of creative writing at Colgate University, Balakian has earned many awards and prizes including the Presidential Medal and the Movses Khorenatsi Medal from the Republic of Armenia. This spring, he became the first Bucknellian to be named a Janet Weis Fellow in Contemporary Letters.
Young Alumni Award
Jaynemarie Enyonam Angbah ’03: Angbah has spent more than a decade as an adjunct lecturer, curriculum developer, cultural competence consultant, educator and school-based therapist. At Boys & Girls Clubs of America, she was senior director, teen youth development — responsible for developing and implementing programs that prepared teen members to be scholars, community advocates and 21st-century leaders. As director of operations at Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club, she oversees the programming and operations at the organization’s nine sites across the Bronx. Angbah has been involved with the Bucknell Black Alumni Association and volunteered with the University’s Career Development Center.