Ted and Shirley Taubeneck Superior Teaching Award
— Award-Winning HSP Course —
Each year, Humanities Seminars Program students select a small group of professors whose teaching rises to the highest level of excellence. Chosen entirely through student evaluations, the Ted and Shirley Taubeneck Superior Teaching Award recognizes faculty who combine deep scholarly expertise with the rare ability to ignite curiosity and sustain lively intellectual discovery in the classroom.
This summer, we are pleased to make our 2024 award-winning seminars available again as recorded courses. These classes capture the energy, insight, and conversation that made them standouts among HSP’s many seminars. If you missed the opportunity to take the course live, this re-release offers a chance to explore an exceptional seminar led by one of the University of Arizona’s most inspiring teachers. For those who have never experienced an HSP course, it is also a perfect way to test the waters. Enrollment provides online access to the complete course experience, including video recordings of each session, the original syllabus, and course readings. The seminar remains exactly as students encountered it during its original presentation—an invitation to join a community of curious learners and follow the ideas wherever they lead.
Course Description
In this course, we’ll explore the work of four writers contemporary to each other, week by week: Larry Levis, Carl Phillips, Ada Limón and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. We’ll spend time together learning about what makes them the celebrated writers they are—what formal choices they might be making on the page, and how their unique styles as poets create a singular quality to their work. Each course session will have a short orienting lecture, and the balance of the time will be more conversational in nature, following student feedback and questions arising from the course reading. In surveying these four poets, students will gain a framework for approaching contemporary poetry and develop skills that can be broadly applied to other work.
Summer Registration Opens
Monday, March 30, 2026 at 8 AM (AZ Time)
