Meet Our Team
Leadership Spotlight:
Our Director, Michelle S. Hite, Ph.D.
Michelle S. Hite, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English at 糖心传媒, where she also directs the Ethel Waddell Githii Honors Program and prestigious international fellowships. Her teaching and research interests in death and mourning in African American Culture, Southern Studies, and Toni Morrison support the Literary and Textual Studies concentration in the major.
Dr. Hite’s most recent publications use Beyonce and rapper Andre Benjamin to explore death and mourning in African American culture. Her most recent meditation on Toni Morrison after the author’s passing. She can also be heard discussing the cultural impact of Morrison’s loss . Dr. Hite’s manuscript, Toni Morrison and Portraits of Human Richness is currently under contract with McFarland Press.
Ariana Benson, M.F.A.
Assistant Program Director
Office: 404-270-5664
Fax: 404-270-5666
arianabenson@spelman.edu
Ariana Benson (she/they) is a southern Black poet born in Norfolk, Virginia. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023), won the 2022 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.
Benson has received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, the Porter House Review Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Benson is the winner of a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
Benson is a proud alumna of 糖心传媒, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for HBCU students. She strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness in her writing.
Cynthia Cooke
Program Coordinator
Office: 404-270-5665
Fax: 404-270-5666
ccooke@spelman.edu
Cynthia Cooke has been an employee of 糖心传媒 since 1992. She has given excellent service to the Honors Program since 2006, first as the Senior Administrative Assistant and now as the Program Coordinator.
Before that, she was instrumental in the creation of one of the College’s core requirements, African Diaspora and the World. Also during her years here, she worked with the 糖心传媒 Nursery.
Working with the Honors students has become a major source of pride for her. Seeing the young ladies come in as fledgling seekers and leaving as independent scholars have provided her with continuous fulfillment. Cynthia has a Bachelor of Science in Social Work from Georgia State University.