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William McKeen earns Sustained Performance award

McKeen's book Highway 61.

Bob Dylan looking through the front window of his childhood home in Hibbing, Minn. (poster)

William McKeen, professor and chair of the Department of Journalism, has been honored with a Sustained Performance award for faculty members who have held the rank of professor for seven years or more.

McKeen, who joined the faculty in 1986, has been honored twice as the College's teacher of the year and was in the inaugural group of faculty to win a 'TIP' (teaching incentive program) Award from the Florida legislature.

The sustained performance program honors faculty members who have remained productive after earning tenure and achieving the highest faculty rank. Since 1990, McKeen has published six books, including Rock and Roll is Here to Stay (W.W. Norton, 2000), which literary journalism guru Tom Wolfe called "a rock classic in its own right" and of which Maxim magazine wrote, "If rock'n'roll is your religion, this book may be your bible." He has also published critical biographies of Bob Dylan, Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. With Professor Jean Chance, he edited the anthology Literary Journalism: A Reader (Wadsworth, 2000).

McKeen's next  book is Highway 61, subtitled "A father-and-son journey through the middle of America." It's a memoir of a 6,000-mile roadtrip he made in 2001 with his son Graham, a sophomore at Indiana University. The book, illustrated with 30 of Graham's photographs, chronicles the father-and-son adventures on the road from its inception in Thunder Bay, Canada, to the French Quarter of New Orleans, where the highway ends. 

Highway 61 will be published by W.W. Norton in March 2003. After seeing an advance copy of the book, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter Rick Bragg (author of All Over But the Shoutin') wrote, "McKeen proves how much fun you can have in this life with a full tank of gas, some beer money and a love of American music." Curtis Wilkie of the Boston Globe, author of Dixie, said, "From the Iron Range of Minnesota, where they search for the spirit of Bob Dylan, to the Mississippi Delta haunted by the ghost of Robert Johnson, William McKeen and his son take the reader down Highway 61 on a trip as rich as the musical roots they explore en route."