By Thea Jarvis

William A. Sessions, Regents professor of English at Georgia State University (GSU), is a recent recipient of the 1992 Outstanding Teacher Award for Ph.D.-granting institutions from the South Atlantic Association of Departments of English (SAADE).

Dr. Sessions, a parishioner at Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Atlanta, was honored at the University of Knoxville in Tennessee last November by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, representing almost 700 colleges and universities in 11 states. He was chosen from an academic field that included professors from the Universities of Virginia, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke, Vanderbilt and Emory, among others.

“Professor Sessions…is an astute and deservedly renowned scholar and his approach to classroom teaching earns him consistently high praise from his students.” Wrote Virginia Spencer Carr, chair of Georgia State’s English department, in nominating her colleague for the award.

“As a teacher, he is an illuminator,” she said, “unlocking the vistas of history and literature for his students to absorb into their own busy modern milieu, taking pains to translate, as he likes to put it, the words of the past into the urban present.”

SAADE gives four awards annually, one each to a junior college teacher, an instructor, a professor at a senior university and a professor at a university granting doctoral degrees.

Dr. Sessions was named a Regents professor in November, becoming one of just 10 so designated at Georgia State, where faculty number over 900 and the student population is 24,000. The Board of Regents for the state’s university system grants such appointments to professors nationally recognized for their scholarship and leadership.

The Regents’ appointment, which took effect Jan. 1, was “something I had anticipated,” Dr. Sessions said during an interview at his home near Oglethorpe University. “The other award I had not anticipated.”

He has authored or edited countless books and articles on Renaissance literature and his poetry has been featured in The Southern Review, The Chattahoochee Review and The Atlanta Quarterly. His play, A Shattering of Glass, won the Southern Theater Playwrights’ Competition at the University of Mississippi in 1988. He is currently finishing a lengthy manuscript on the poetry of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, while teaching at Georgia State.

“I have enormous projects ahead,” he said with characteristic energy.

Dr. Sessions’ former student, Atlanta Magazine editor Lee Walburn, said the professor has always been a step ahead of everyone else.

“He’s not only ahead of everybody else, he’s above everybody else,” Walburn said.

Despite Dr. Sessions’ keen intelligence and scholarly bent, he is not easily packaged in neat academic trappings. He was a civil rights marcher in the fifties and traded literary criticism with E.E. Cummings and William Faulkner. He spent three colorful years in the New York theater. Only a damaged knee prevented his becoming a professional dancer.

“At the core of Bill Sessions, you also have an artist,” said Victor Kramer, professor of English and American literature at Georgia State.

The pleasant surprise of being named “outstanding” among an impressive collection of peers came after over 30 years of teaching. Dr. Sessions believes he presents “not only what’s being said” in literature, “but the relevance of the studies.” For him, making the classics come alive involves translating the past into the present, helping students draw relationships from ancient texts to today’s world. He feels such teaching parallels the way the Catholic Church applies its doctrine and tradition to contemporary culture.

At GSU, where he teaches everything from small graduate seminars in Renaissance poetry to crowded sophomore survey courses, Dr. Sessions enjoys “reproducing in my teaching what the Catholic Church does,” imbuing the present with the truth and stability of the past.

Dr. Sessions embraced Catholicism in 1956 after an exhaustive exploration of theology chipped away at his youthful agnosticism.

Raised a Southern Baptist in the little town of Conway, NC, he had left his early faith behind when he moved into his teens. Baptist teaching “was a very good training for me. I knew the Bible very well,” he remembered. But, “my real problem was that I simply didn’t believe in God. I couldn’t see that there was any inevitability of the relationship from the individual to anything else.”

At 19, Dr. Sessions graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was founding editor of The Carolina Quarterly. He went on to pursue a master’s degree at Columbia University in New York City and there met Catholic author Caroline Gordon, a member of the Columbia Faculty. “I began reading” theology over the next five or six years, he said, “coming back to a concept of God.”

After a career in New York that included a stint with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company and a job on Wall Street, he left the city to teach at West Georgia College in Carrollton. His interest in Catholicism heightened with trips to the Monastery of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, where he began religious instruction under Father Paul Bourne, OCSO. During that time, he developed a unique friendship with author Flannery O’Connor, who, like himself, reviewed books for The Georgia Bulletin.

The transition from bright city lights to life in a small southern town was “like coming to the moon,” said Dr. Sessions. Carrollton’s tiny Catholic church was only as big as his living room, he recalled, but it boasted notables like actress Susan Hayward, who married a Carrollton resident and visited the parish from time to time.

Dr. Sessions said he made the formal move into the Catholic Church at the age of 27 when “the concept of an act of faith was given to me.”

“From the moment I took first communion I had total belief,” he later wrote to Flannery O’Connor. In the 35 years since becoming Catholic, he says now, there has been “not one doubt. It simply took with me totally from that point.”

Dr. Sessions’ faith was his steady companion when he traveled to Germany as a Fulbright scholar in 1958. He visited countless shrines throughout Europe and, at each one, prayed for a wife, “If it was God’s will,” he recalls now.

On holiday in Greece during his Fulbright year, he met young Jenny Delijannis, who became his wife in 1961, after a two-and-a-half-year intercontinental correspondence. Mrs. Sessions teaches foreign languages at Tucker High School in DeKalb County and the couple has two sons. Andrew, 30, is finishing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin. Eric, 27, is a third year medical student at the Medical College of Georgia.

Before he made Georgia his permanent home, Dr. Sessions taught for two years at Jesuit-run Spring Hill College in Mobile, where he formed a close friendship with Catholic author and fellow convert, Walker Percy. He returned to New York to complete his doctorate in English and comparative literature at Columbia before joining the staff at Georgia State in 1967.

As an academic and a Catholic, Dr. Sessions brings a unique perspective to education and its place in the fabric of faith. For him, private education – the Catholic high school in particular – is more workable and efficient than the public system.

“This is where the church is at its best,” he said. “The rich tradition of Catholic schools needs to be revived.”

Too much of the church’s financial resources are put into social programs, said Dr. Sessions, yet “poverty is perennial, like original sin. It’s going to be there.”

Teaching sound Catholic doctrine ultimately enhances the church’s outreach to the poor, he believes, since charity to others is fundamental to the faith.

“Unless we have centers of education, we’re not going to have a Catholic identity” that knows how to deal with knotty moral and social issues, he said. “Catholic schools are designed to train the intellect.” In its schools, “the Catholic Church has a forum” for promoting values and leadership.

Dr. Kramer described his colleague as a “king of Catholic presence” at Georgia State. He said Dr. Sessions’ faith is “absolutely central” to his life and work.

“He has had a direct influence on students who have subsequently become Catholics,” said Dr. Kramer, a member of St. Thomas More parish in Deactur. “He shares the experience of his Catholicism,” even bringing loaves of monastery bread to GSU secretaries.

The Monastery of the Holy Spirit continues to be an important part of Dr. Sessions’ life, Dr. Kramer said, adding that his friend usually schedules a trip to Conyers at the end of every academic quarter.

Father Paul, whose longtime friendship with Flannery O’Connor began when Dr. Sessions introduced the monk to the author, said Dr. Sessions is well-known for his conservative Catholicism.

“But he’s not a narrow-minded conservative at all,” Father Paul said. “His strict Catholicism is conservative. His attitude toward life is well-grounded.”

“He is so smart, brilliant,” said Father Paul. “He’s just deeply attached to the Catholic faith.”