The Alumni Association Board of Directors has announced the recipients for the 2020 awards bestowed by the Alumni Association. Nominations were received from the entire Antiochian community. The nominations were reviewed by the Alumni Board Nominations Committee which presented candidates to the full Board for discussion and ratification.

The recipients are: Keith Hickman ’90, Ben London ’89, Bethany Saltman ’92, Steve Duffy ’77, and Quandra Prettyman ’54.

The recipients will be featured in virtually presented via Zoom during Reunion 2020; see the full schedule and register for sessions on the Alumni Association website.

Horace Mann Award: Keith Hickman ’90

The Horace Mann Award recognizes contributions by alumni of Antioch College who have “won some victory for humanity,” following Horace Mann’s advice to the graduating class of 1859. Recipients are persons, or groups of persons, whose personal or professional activities have had a profound effect on the present or future human condition. Mann was the first president of Antioch College.

Keith Hickman ’90 is Executive Director of Collective Impact at the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP), the world’s first graduate school wholly devoted to restorative practices. In this role, Keith works with partner organizations, both domestically and globally, to pursue the IIRP mission of positively impacting social health by helping individuals find new ways to empower people and transform communities.

He served as an advisor to the Maryland Commission on the School-to-Prison Pipeline and Restorative Practices and a partner scholar on several national work groups focused on diversity, equity and inclusion.

His work with school districts and community-based agencies include the cities of Chicago, Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Baton Rouge, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Washington, DC, the Republic of Jamaica, including Kingston, and his hometown of Louisville, KY. In Detroit, he helped bring together schools, police, human services, court systems, corrections and neighborhood associations that are working together to positively impact children and families throughout the city.

Keith has served in high-level leadership positions for the New York City Department of Education and New Leaders for New Schools. In 2000, he helped found the Youth Justice Project at the Harlem Community Justice Center, under the Center of Court Innovation. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Sociology of Human Development (Class of 1990) and is enrolled in graduate school at IIRP.

Keith married his college partner Katherine Kavanagh ’92 in 2000.

Arthur Morgan Award: Ben London  ’89

The Arthur Morgan Award recognizes contributions by alumni or friends of the College which exemplify the concept of “community” advocated by Arthur Morgan. The nominees for this award should be persons, or groups of persons, who have contributed to their community—either local, national or world—in a manner which brings members of the community together in order to work toward common goals. Morgan served as President of Antioch College for 16 years.

Ben London  ’89 is a Seattle-based musician/recording artist who currently serves as Executive Director for Black Fret Seattle, a 501c3 non-profit that empowers musicians to create and perform new music. Prior, he held senior positions with the music museum Experience Music Project (MoPop), The Recording Academy (GRAMMYS), Hewlett Packard and Northwest Polite Society. London was the inaugural chair of the Seattle Music Commission and has served on boards including KEXP and the Vera Project. His music has been featured in a wide variety of movies and television programs. London’s music projects include Alcohol Funnycar, St. Bushmills Choir, Sanford Arms, Selene Vigil and STAG.

Ben grew up in a house of music and followed in the footsteps of his mother, Janet McLeod London ’56). His parents had met at Antioch (his father was music director for the Shakespeare Festival), and Ben met his partner Roseann Moss London ’89 on campus, continuing the tradition.

On arrival at Antioch in 1985, fate—or the magic wand of Doris Ehmann in the housing office—paired Ben and Steve Moriarty ’89 as freshman roommates, with Matt Dresdner ’89 and Adrian Garver ’89 in the room next door. It took about five minutes for music to break out. Over the next four years they formed bands on campus and Co-ops. The College provided the freedom and spaces to play music, record DIY cassettes and put on shows. It was as if, under the watchful eye of Dean of Students Steve Schwerner ’60, the lunatics had taken over the asylum. After graduation, a group relocated to Seattle in 1989 and pursued careers in music throughout the ’90s, realizing the dreams they had imagined as students. The tragic loss of their dear friend and classmate Mia Zapata ’88 in 1993 was a major blow to the group, one that they are still reconciling to this day.

Rebecca Rice Award: Bethany Saltman ’92

The Rebecca Rice Award recognizes alumni of Antioch College who by their actions, achievements, and leadership have distinguished themselves and their alma mater. The recipients of this award are persons who have excelled in their vocation or field of study. The award is named for the first female trustee—and longtime faculty member—of Antioch College.

Bethany Saltman ’92 considers her time at Antioch the most important influence in her life, impressing upon her the power of ideas to oppress and liberate.

Bethany worked with the “Womyn of Antioch” to write the original Sexual Offense Prevention Policy (SOPP). She graduated with a BA in literature, then received an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College in 1994. She published poems in national journals and taught writing at CUNY schools, including Medgar Evers College. She began presenting academic papers on composition and Whiteness in the “basic writing” classroom and was offered a position at Polytechnic University. After starting coursework toward a linguistics doctorate, Bethany realized that her scholarly questions were actually spiritual ones, so she left the program and moved into Zen Mountain Monastery, where she met her husband, Thayer Case. They married in 2001.

Bethany began her career as a journalist, professional researcher, and book partner, working with many bestselling authors in Phoenicia, New York in 2003. She was invited to become a senior lay student in the Mountains and Rivers Order of Zen Buddhism. After giving birth to her daughter, Azalea, she became fascinated by attachment, one of the most rigorously studied fields of developmental psychology. Bethany spent the next decade teaching herself this complex science, traveling to labs, archives and trainings, piecing together the biography of one of the field’s unsung female heroes, Dr. Mary Ainsworth, asking herself what kind of mother she was.

In 2020, Random House published her first book, Strange Situation: A Mother’s Journey Into the Science of Attachment. Acclaimed as “one of the best science books of 2020,” Strange Situation is the first of its kind—a memoir that reveals the intimate details of how the science of attachment and the Buddhist concept of attachment intersect in one woman’s life.

J.D. Dawson Award: Steven Duffy ’77

The J.D. Dawson Award recognizes significant contributions to Antioch College by alumni or friends of Antioch. The recipients of this award are persons who have contributed in a significant way to Antioch College or a program of Antioch College. Perhaps best-known for his involvement with the Co-op department, J.D. Dawson’s entire career was dedicated to Antioch College.

Steve Duffy ’77 (known to one and all as Duffy) has never met a tie-dye t-shirt he didn’t like. As he explains, “I got my first shirt in the summer of ’85. There was a student packing up and leaving to follow a band around the country, a band called the Grateful Dead. At the library, I always helped keep her record clean. When she was moving out, she tossed a tie-dye shirt at me from the top of the fire escape in North and yelled, ‘Thanks for keeping my record clean.’ A week later, I wore the shirt in New York and it almost stopped traffic. So I had that one shirt, then two, then three, and it’s now closer to 130.”

Duffy has spent roughly 53 years—minus two years helping run the Los Angeles Free Clinic in the early seventies—at our small but mighty and catalytic college nestled in the rolling hills of southwest Ohio, taking what he thought might be a temporary job after graduation at the Olive Kettering Library (OKL).

Over the next four and some decades, he calls himself blessed to have a great river of students, faculty, staff, and alumni float by, and has trained hundreds of students to work at that quirky yet wonderful academic library.

The day after the College closed in 2008, Duffy went to work at the College Revival Fund as Assistant Director of Alumni Relations. When the College reopened in Fall of 2011 he returned to the OKL. Probably no one else experienced more joy than he did when new students came as Antioch College reopened. He did brief stints on ComCil, AdCil, The Sexual Offense Hearing Board, served many elected terms as a Union Steward and six years on the Alumni Board, and has been involved with the Antioch College Alumni for Diversity Affinity Group since 2006. Duffy continues to be a tireless booster of all things Antioch, and his column “A Buffalo Grazing” is a staple in College communications.

Walter F. Anderson Award: Quandra Prettyman ’54

The Walter F. Anderson Award recognizes contributions by alumni and friends who have advanced Antioch College’s ideals by breaking down racial and ethnic barriers. The award is named for Antioch’s longtime music department chair, the first African-American department head at a historically non-black institution of higher education. Recipients have shown fortitude and effectiveness in promoting diversity within the Antioch community and beyond.

Quandra Prettyman ’54 grew up as the child of two school teachers in Baltimore, MD. She attended Antioch College where she majored in history, graduating in 1954. She studied English literature at the University of Michigan from 1955-1957. Quandra then moved to New York City where she worked in publishing and began teaching.

In 1970, she joined the faculty of Barnard College in the English department. In addition to teaching conventional English courses, Quandra’s interests led her to create new courses including The Harlem Renaissance; Slavery: the Woman’s Experience, Black and White; Minority Women Writers in the US (Native American, African American, Latina, Asian American); Literature of the Great Migration, and Early African American literature 1760-1890. Her commitment to African American literature and studies has inspired countless students during her 50 year career as a Senior Associate in English. Although officially retired, Quandra has continued to teach groundbreaking courses as recently as the fall of 2019.

Quandra’s writing and poetry has been published in various forums. Several of her poems appear in Arnold Adoff’s The Poetry of Black America. She edited Out of Our Lives: A Selection of Contemporary Black Fiction in 1975. Her interest in cookbooks and recipes led to her article, “Come Eat at My Table: Lives with Recipes” published by Southern Quarterly in 1992.

In her “retirement,” Quandra continues to work on many projects involving her cookbooks, her poetry and her continuing passion for African American studies.