Two Coastal Carolina University faculty members - Dan Albergotti, professor of English, and Christopher Hill, ornithology professor in the College of Science - received Kearns and Spivey Palmetto Professorships, respectively, it was announced at the board of trustees meeting today.

Both are endowed professorships intended to honor Coastal faculty members who have demonstrated outstanding skills as a teacher and scholar, service to the University and their profession, and who have enhanced Coastal's national and international reach.

Albergotti is a poet and has been a professor in CCU's English department since 2005, also serving a term as department chair. He has been largely responsible for building the creative writing curriculum at CCU. He is the founding editor of Waccamaw, Coastal's online literary journal, and he started the "Words to Say It" visiting writers series. Albergotti has served the profession by teaching workshops and giving lectures and readings at other institutions, by judging poetry contests, and by evaluating panel proposals for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference.

Albergotti is also the author of "The Boatloads" (BOA Editions, 2008) and "Millennial Teeth" (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), as well as a limited-edition chapbook, "The Use of the World" (Unicorn Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in the Cincinnati Review, Five Points, the Southern Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and two editions of Pushcart Prize, as well as many other journals and anthologies.

Hill, a biology professor who specializes in ornithology, joined CCU's faculty in 1999; his research interests are in bird mating systems and ecology, and in water-bird biology. At various times in his career, he has used tools ranging from binoculars and field notebooks to an automated DNA sequencer to answer various questions in avian biology. He has published more than 15 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, and he also regularly publishes notes in other outlets ranging from newsletters of scientific societies to popular magazines. He is contributing to the development of the new master's degree in integrative biology program at CCU.

Previous Kearns Palmetto Professors are: Richard Dame, 1991-1996; Richard Collin, 1996-2001; Paul Gayes, 2001-2007; Sara Sanders, 2007-2012; and Var Limpasuvan, 2012-2017. Hill has previously held the Spivey Palmetto Professorship.