On Thursday, May 4, novelist James Finney Boylan, a Colby College associate professor of English, will receive the Senior Class Charles Bassett Teaching Award and will deliver the college’s final Spotlight Event lecture of the year. Boylan’s talk will take place at 7 p.m. in the Page Commons Room of Cotter Union at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Each year one faculty member is chosen by a vote of the senior class to receive the teaching award and to address the college. The award recognizes Boylan as one of the most popular professors on a faculty that numbers more than 150. Boylan teaches creative writing workshops in fiction and English literature and composition courses at Colby.

Boylan earned his bachelor’s degree at Wesleyan University and a master’s at Johns Hopkins University. He joined the Colby faculty in 1988. He is the author of the novels The Planets, The Constellations and Getting In. Getting In was optioned for film by New Line Cinema and recently was chosen as an alternate selection by the Book of the Month Club. The novel also won the 1999 Alex award of the American Library Association, honoring a writer of adult fiction that celebrates the lives of adolescents. Boylan is also the author of the short story collection Remind Me to Murder You Later.

Boylan previously worked with the original cast of Saturday Night Live on the short-lived American Bystander magazine, of which he was managing editor. He served in the editorial departments of The Viking Press, Penguin Books and E.P. Dutton, Inc. He currently lives in Belgrade Lakes with his wife, Deirdre, and children Zachary and Sean.