Coming home: Dr. Keith Gilyard, former MEC faculty, to receive honorary degree at Commencement

 
By David Gil de Rubio | dgilderubio@mec.cuny.edu

When Dr. Keith Gilyard steps on the stage to receive his Doctor of Letters honorary degree from Medgar Evers College at Commencement on May 31, 2024, he’ll find himself coming full circle.

A 14-year MEC faculty member from 1981 to 1995, Gilyard — alongside Elizabeth Nunez, Steven Cannon and Arnold Kemp — helped founder John Oliver Killens get the National Black Writers Conference off the ground in 1986. 

And while he just celebrated his 25th anniversary at his current academic home of Penn State University, the Harlem native has plenty of fond memories about his time teaching in Central Brooklyn. 

“My foundation as an academic is Medgar Evers College,” he said with pride. “I learned a lot from faculty and students. I had great mentors like my old office mates, the late Steve Cannon and Arnold Kemp. Same goes for Liz Nunez, who was always pushing me to do things. I think I had some of the best mentors in the country in my department. 

“I couldn’t have met better people to get me started in the academic life at Medgar Evers College.” 

As a child, Gilyard says he was “…a sucker for crafted language, particularly what was in the air in Harlem.” Raised in a home where reading was encouraged — “my mom always had a magazine, book or something whenever you looked at her,” he recalled — and where the World Book Encyclopedia was a staple, Gilyard’s love of literature only deepened when his family moved to Corona, Queens when he was in elementary school. 

He was a fixture at the Queensborough Public Library and wound up attending New York City’s esteemed Stuyvesant High School, where he was a year behind future United States Attorney General Eric Holder.  

Gilyard went on to receive his BS from CUNY in 1974, his MFA from Columbia University in 1979 and his EdD from New York University in 1985, where he met future faculty mate Dr. Brenda Greene. 

“Brenda and I came around the same time,” he said. “But I already knew Brenda because we went to graduate school and were in classes at NYU together. We used to sit around and were mostly concerned with the writing, composition and language programs, mostly what we were studying in school. Brenda and I would sit around and think about changes we could make to the curriculum. I’m actually the person who got the computers in and set up the computer writing center, which I think still exists. That’s the kind of work we were doing.” 

The National Black Writers Conference remains a major point of pride for Gilyard if for no other reason the attention it has brought to Medgar Evers College. 

“I hope the National Black Writers Conference continues to evolve because you have several generations of writers, fans and readers that have come along since then,” he explained. “I think it is important because it brought attention to the possibilities of a place like Medgar Evers College. Not only that, but you look at some of the faculty at Medgar Evers College. 

“We’ve had Pulitzer Prize-winners come off the Medgar Evers College faculty. I don’t know if there’s any other school that is larger or comparable that can say they had someone like Tracy Smith on their faculty. When history is told, people will realize the kind of gem it is as an institution in the middle of Brooklyn.” 

Gilyard is equally proud of the students he’s mentored who continue to be a big part of the Medgar Evers College family and its culture. 

“Dr. Mudiwa Pettus has now taken over the editorship of The Killens Review, but she was my student at Penn State and I steered her to Medgar Evers College and she loves it there,” Gilyard said with a hint of pride. “She’s one of the best young faculty in America. I also had students like Michael Chance who is the director of the Learning Center. I was his CUNY BA advisor when he was an undergrad.

“Elizabeth Adrien was my student when she was 17 years old. She’d just come over from Dominica and I’m still in touch with her to this day. That’s really interesting to me—that some of those students are at the college making contributions and that I have one student there that is a professor.” 

When asked about what it means to be receiving this honorary degree, Gilyard is equal parts humbled and grateful to the institution that started him down the road of language.  

“Medgar Evers College was great for me,” he said. “I learned a lot about African-American literature and the diaspora. That was the key to me — being in a place where so much of the African diaspora was around. And that’s why I say I learned so much from the students about things that were going on in different places where they were from. When history is told, people will realize the kind of gem it is as an institution in the middle of Brooklyn.”