UCSB English professor Shirley Geok-Lin Lim was recently honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to and study of Asian American literature.

The Society of the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States awarded Lim for her fiction, poetry and other scholarly work in the field of Asian American studies. She will be presented with the award next month at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention in Philadelphia, Pa.

English Dept. Chair Alan Liu said in an e-mail that the award is well-deserved.

“Shirley Lim has been one of the nation’s strongest, most imaginative and most consistent voices for the full, multiethnic variety of literatures both past and present,” Liu said. “The MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award is a fitting public recognition of her career.”

Moreover, Liu described Lim as an invaluable asset and resource to the English Dept. at UCSB.

“From the specific perspective of our English Dept. is the difference she has made in the intellectual lives of countless students, both the undergraduates her teaching has nurtured and the graduate students working on multi-ethnic U.S. writings for whom she has been an extraordinarily supportive, committed mentor,” Liu said. “Sometimes I think that she treats her advisees as if they were poems or stories she was writing – something intimate to be crafted with all best care, but also something independent to let grow and evolve by itself.”

The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes scholars who dedicate their studies to Latino American, Native American, African American, Asian or Pacific American and ethnic Euro-American literature. In addition, Lim has also been awarded the American Book Award and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize at various points throughout her career.