Writing about reading: English chair’s recent award
Emma Ogren, Staff Writer
Photo by Emma Ogren
The chair of North Greenville University’s English department, Rachel Roberts, was recently granted the 2025 Arlin G. Meyer Book Award for her work “Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert the Vices of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age.” The book was published in May 2024 by Baker Academic.
This award was given by the Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities. The Lilly Network states that their mission is, “Strengthening the quality and shaping the character of church-related higher education,” according to their website.
About the award, Roberts said, “It recognizes an excellent book in the area of Christian higher education. It brings a lot of recognition to the book and honors its excellence. When we were looking back at the previous winners of this award, it was a lot of authors that we had cited and used in the project.”
“Deep Reading,” was written in conjunction with Rachel B. Griffis, who is an associate professor of English at Spring Arbor University, which is located in Michigan. Also involved was Julie Ooms, who is a professor of English at Missouri Baptist University.
“We all met when we were graduate students together and we kept up our friendship. And now we’ve written a book together,” Roberts said about her co-authors.
NGU is not a school that is in the Lilly Network, but both of Roberts’ co-authors come from schools who are a part of the Lilly Network. Roberts also got her PhD from Baylor University, which is in the network, having a connection that way as well.
Roberts describes “Deep Reading,” as such, “It’s about reading practices for character formation, which is the idea that choosing the books that we read matters. We focus in the book on ways that we can approach reading, practices and habits that form our character in positive ways.”
How reading affects our character and personality is widely researched in psychology. It is accepted that reading widens a human’s ability to empathize with others and understand another person’s thoughts. This is according to the National Library of Medicine.
Roberts and her co-authors wanted to take it a step further.
“So we particularly look at ways in which reading can make us more attentive, less distracted,” Roberts said. “As well as more hospitable and less hostile, moving away from the kind of divisions that we see everywhere.”
The thought for this book came along in 2019 after the three authors had been in a writing group for some time. They would often give each other their works and give feedback and editing to one another. After doing this for a year and a half, they decided to write something together.
“Because we are all teachers of literature, which involves a lot of reading, and because we are all Christians who think deeply about moral and religious aspects of our vocation, we really decided that we wanted to write a book about reading Christianly.”
The book consists of an introduction and conclusion that all the authors worked on together. It also has six chapters, each author mainly writing two.
Roberts said, “One of our goals was to write a book that truly felt like we had all contributed.”
Very similar to their writing group, they would then let the others look over the chapter and add their thoughts, eventually reaching the final product.
