A memorial gathering for colleagues, friends, and family of  Robin O. Metz will be held on Saturday, April 6, 2019, at 2:30 p.m. at Harbach Theatre in the Ford Center for the Fine Arts on the Knox College campus.

Metz, Philip Sidney Post Professor of English and co-founder of Knox's Program in Creative Writing, passed away Tuesday, November 27. He was 76.

Individuals attending the memorial gathering are asked to RSVP by Monday, April 1, at www.knoxalumni.org/MetzMemorial or by calling the Knox College Office of Alumni Relations at 309-341-7238. View a list of area  accommodations.

The longest-serving member of the Knox faculty and an internationally acclaimed author, Metz first came to Knox in 1967. He was the co-founder and, since 1985, director of Knox's renowned Program in Creative Writing. 

Metz taught all levels of writing at Knox, from introductory courses in fiction, poetry, and playwriting, through Senior Portfolio, the capstone experience for all writing majors. He delighted in teaching Creativity in First-Year Preceptorial, as well as literature courses, including Modern British/Irish Literature and Contemporary American Fiction. He initiated groundbreaking interdisciplinary courses, such as London Arts Alive, many of which included travel to U.S. and international locales, such as Dublin, Paris, Wales, Northern Michigan, Key West, and Cuba, and numerous single-author courses, including Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Richard Yates, August Wilson, Natasha Trethewey, Rita Dove, Dorothea Tanning, Carl Sandburg, and others. In addition to receiving numerous international writing prizes, Metz was awarded both the untenured and tenured Philip Green Wright prizes for distinguished teaching and the Caterpillar Corporation Award for outstanding creative/scholarly achievement.

To honor his more than half-century legacy to Knox's English department, Robin and Elizabeth Carlin Metz established the Robin Metz Endowed Fund in Support of the Creative Arts. Metz strove to bring to campus an array of high-profile poets, fiction writers, play- and screenwriters, essayists, and scholars to share their work in an open setting as a way to expose students to the elegance and power of the spoken and written word. The Metz Fund will ensure that this interaction between artists and the Knox community continues in perpetuity, as his living legacy.