Cyn Fitch , assistant professor of English, and ​​Jeff Grace,  assistant professor theatre, were awarded tenure for their career successes as well as their service to Knox College, at the most recent Board of Trustees meeting.

In addition, Linda Dybas '64​, Watson Bartlett Professor of Biology​, ​was ​awarded emeritus status as she concludes a faculty career at Knox that began in 1977.

"Congratulations to each of these members of the Knox faculty on this milestone in their careers," said Knox College President Teresa Amott. "And a special thanks to our newest Emeritus Professor for ​her years of distinguished service to Knox."

Cyn Fitch 

Cyn Fitch holds an M.F.A. degree from Spalding University and her B.A. from Knox. An accomplished writer, Fitch has published numerous short stories and essays in her time at Knox. She was an invited participant in the Wet Mountain Valley Writers' Workshop in 2013 and was a Top Ten Finalist in 2009 storySouth Million Writers Award. As a Knox student, Fitch won the Davenport Prize in Poetry, a distinguished honor for students in the English Department.

As a professor, Fitch enjoys teaching creative writing, beginning to advanced fiction, nonfiction taught in a workshop setting, composition and rhetoric, and modern and contemporary American literature with an emphasis on Southern writers. Currently, she is penning a novel (​​Rainy Moon Rising) and several collections of essays. She has been at Knox since 2006.

Students say Fitch's "ability to share so much of herself gives us, her students, the courage to dig deeper into ourselves, deeply enriching our own work with our unique pasts."

​​Jeff Grace

Grace earned both his his Ph.D. and M.S. in education from Indiana University after earning his B.A. from Brigham Young University. According to Grace, his research and teaching interests lie in "the representation of homosexual visibility on stage." Grace further explores theatre history, directing, American alternative theatre, gay and lesbian theatre, postmodernism, and drag narratives in his independent work.

Several of his directing and writing credits were performed at Knox, such as The Caffe Cino Project, Next Fall, and ​​The Secret in the Wings, one of the two productions of Repertory Term Winter 2016. In 2012, he received the Philip Green Wright-Lombard College Prize for Excellence in Teaching for Non-Tenured Faculty. He has been at Knox since 2009.

Students refer to Grace as an "inspiration" and a professor who "embodies the liberal arts spirit by making connections between theatre and other disciplines."