Sports
Brown to confer honorary degrees on seven distinguished leaders at Commencement 2025
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — During its Commencement and Reunion Weekend from May 23 to 25, Brown University will confer honorary doctorates on seven candidates who have achieved great distinction in a variety of fields. The candidates are:
- Jon Batiste — Award-winning musician
- Allyson Felix — Olympic gold medalist
- Eileen Hayes — Social services leader
- Suleika Jaouad — Author and artist
- William Kentridge — Artist
- Timothy Snyder — Historian
- Kevin Young — Award-winning poet
Recipients will receive prominent recognition at the University Ceremony on Sunday, May 25. Felix, who is a five-time Olympian and the most decorated American track and field athlete in history, will deliver the Baccalaureate address to the University’s undergraduate Class of 2025 on Saturday afternoon at the First Baptist Church in America. The ceremony will be livestreamed on Brown’s Commencement website.
Honorary degrees are awarded by the Board of Fellows of the Corporation of Brown University and are conferred by University President Christina H. Paxson during Commencement exercises.
While the Board of Fellows awards the degrees, many of the recipients were recommended by the Advisory Committee on Honorary Degrees, a faculty and student committee chaired this year by Professor of English Richard Rambuss. The committee offered recommendations for leaders who have demonstrated excellence in a variety of fields, including based on nominations received from Brown faculty, staff and students.
Honorary degree recipients do not serve as Commencement speakers; since its earliest days, Brown has reserved that honor for members of the graduating class. Additional details on Commencement forums and other events during the weekend will be posted on Brown’s Commencement website.
Honorary degree candidates
Jon Batiste
Doctor of Music
Award-winning musician
Jon Batiste is a seven-time Grammy and Academy Award-winning singer, songwriter and composer who is among the most prolific and accomplished contemporary musicians globally.
Born in New Orleans, Batiste is known for powerful music that draws on classical, jazz, R&B and soul. He has released eight studio albums and won, among many honors, an Academy Award for “Best Original Score” for the 2020 Disney-Pixar film “Soul.” His 2021 album “We Are” was nominated for a historic 11 Grammys Awards across seven categories. In 2024, he released his most recent studio album, “Beethoven Blues (Batiste Piano Series, Vol. 1),” which is the first in his solo piano series, reimagining classical works through a fresh lens.
Along with his wife — author and artist Suleika Jaouad — Batiste was the subject of the Oscar and Grammy-nominated 2023 documentary “American Symphony,” which won a Grammy for “Best Music Film” along with an Oscar nomination for “Best Original Song.”
Batiste serves as a creative director for the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. From 2015 until 2022, he served as the bandleader and musical director of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on CBS.
Batiste earned a bachelor’s degree and a master of music from the Juilliard School.
Allyson Felix
Doctor of Humane Letters
Olympic gold medalist
Five-time Olympian Allyson Felix is the most decorated American track and field athlete in history.
With a record 20 world championships and 11 Olympic medals, including seven golds, Felix retired in 2022 leaving a historic legacy in competitive running. In 2024, she was elected to the International Olympic Committee, the governing body of the Olympic Games.
An influential voice in women’s athletics, Felix publicly advocated for improved maternity policies in the sports apparel industry and helped spur maternity protections for sponsored athletes. Ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, she led an initiative to create the first-ever family space in the Olympic Village to support parent-athletes during the games.
Felix is the founder of Saysh footwear for women, a company that challenges traditional gendered sneaker design, and co-founder of Always Alpha, a women’s sports management firm. She serves as an ambassador for Right to Play, which supports underserved children across the world, and co-founded the Power of She Fund at the Women’s Sports Foundation to help provide childcare support for athletes who are mothers.
Felix earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California. She and her husband live in Los Angeles with their two children.
Eileen Hayes
Doctor of Humane Letters
Social services leader
For 24 years, Eileen Hayes has served as president and CEO of Amos House, a Rhode Island social services organization that has supported generations of individuals and families.
A compassionate visionary who began her career as a social worker, Hayes helped transform Amos House from a soup kitchen to a multifaceted organization that offers employment programs, services and housing to individuals facing poverty, hunger, homelessness and addiction.
Under her leadership, Amos House launched two social enterprises, More Than a Meal Catering and Amos House Builds, both of which employ graduates of its training programs and generate income to support the organization. Its housing portfolio has grown to house hundreds of individuals, families, children and older adults in apartments, rooming houses and shelters. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization managed a warming center in Providence that served more than 200 individuals a night.
Hayes has channeled her experience, success and dedication to serving as a mentor and trainer across her field and an adviser on program design and implementation for other organizations. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College and a master of social work from New York University. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and has four children and two grandchildren.
Suleika Jaouad
Doctor of Letters
Author and artist
Suleika Jaouad is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, artist, advocate and New York Times bestselling author of “Between Two Kingdoms” and “The Book of Alchemy.”
After a leukemia diagnosis at age 22, she launched her widely read New York Times column and video series “Life, Interrupted” from her hospital bed. Her essays and reporting have appeared in publications including the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic and Vogue.
Jaouad created the Isolation Journals, a newsletter founded at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that helps 200,000 people from around the world tap into the transformative power of creativity. She and her husband, musician Jon Batiste, are the subject of the Oscar-nominated and Grammy Award-winning documentary “American Symphony,” which portrays the artists during a year of extreme highs and lows.
An advocate for health care reform, Jaouad served on Barack Obama’s Presidential Cancer Panel and received the Inspire Award from the National Marrow Donor Program (Be the Match) for her work to expand and diversify the national bone marrow registry.
A citizen of Tunisia, Switzerland and the United States, Jaouad attended the Juilliard School’s pre-college program for the double bass. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and an MFA from Bennington College.
William Kentridge
Doctor of Fine Arts
Artist
William Kentridge is a leading South African artist whose works have been exhibited globally. Working across drawing, writing and film, Kentridge grounds his creations in politics, science, literature and history. He is renowned for his original works for the stage, which combine performance, projections, voice and music.
Since the 1990s, Kentridge’s art has been exhibited at major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
He has directed Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” Shostakovich’s “The Nose” and Alban Berg’s operas “Lulu” and “Wozzeck” at venues including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, La Scala in Milan, the English National Opera in London and the Salzburg Festival. In 2023, he received an Olivier Award for outstanding achievement in opera for “Sibyl” in London.
Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, where in 2016 he co-founded the Centre for the Less Good Idea, an incubator for experimental performance. In 2024, he was an artist-in-residence at the Brown Arts Institute as part of a series to commemorate the inaugural year of Brown’s Lindemann Performing Arts Center.
Timothy Snyder
Doctor of Letters
Historian
Timothy Snyder is a leading historian on Ukraine, Central Europe, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust who earned his bachelor’s degree in history and political science from Brown University in 1991.
An influential scholar and writer on authoritarianism, politics and health, Snyder offers insightful commentaries and in-depth historical analyses that have inspired artistic expressions ranging from film to rock opera. He has authored or edited 20 books that have been published in 40 languages. Those include “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century,” “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America,” and “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” for which he won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award.
A professor of history at Yale University, Snyder holds the inaugural chair in modern European history at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
Among many recognitions, he has received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, and Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships. He is a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and head of the academic advisory council of the Ukrainian History Global Initiative.
Snyder, who speaks five languages and reads 10 European languages, earned a Ph.D. from Oxford in addition to his degree from Brown.
Kevin Young
Doctor of Letters
Award-winning poet
Kevin Young is an acclaimed poet, essayist, poetry editor and curator who earned his master of fine arts in creative writing from Brown University in 1996.
A prolific poet who has authored 15 books of poetry and prose and edited 11 volumes, Young is the poetry editor at the New Yorker. Among many recognitions for his books of poetry, “Stones” was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, “Book of Hours” won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and “Jelly Roll: a blues” won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a National Book Award finalist.
Young served as director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture from 2021 to 2025, prior to which he directed the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. From 2005 to 2016, he was Candler professor and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.
A recipient of Guggenheim, Stegner and MacDowell fellowships, Young was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and was named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.
Young received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University before earning an MFA from Brown.
Sports
Cedar Rapids wrestler chases her dream, from a volleyball player to a young star in the sport
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) – When Maggie Peters is home, she’s locked in.
She lifts weights at a gym in her hometown of Cedar Rapids. But it’s not just for strength – it’s for safety.
“One things goes wrong, and you’ve got people’s lives in your hands,” she said. “I mean, you don’t want to drop somebody on their head.”
But more often than not, Peters is on the road. Her sport is professional wrestling.
She’s performed performed in front of thousands in arenas and on television. Her fights may be scripted, but her dream of reaching WWE is real.
Peters has a background in volleyball, playing at Cedar Rapids Jefferson, Kirkwood Community College and Mount Mercy. But her dream has always been in the wrestling ring.
“I wanted to do it right when I started watching I wanna say I was eight or nine I would just go wrestle on my trampoline,” Peters said.
She went from the volleyball court at Mount Mercy to a wrestling school in Davenport.
“We would have a show on a Thursday night, so I would leave class early,” said Peters. “But at that point, I will say, my senior year was my worst year of school. Once I got the wrestling training done, I was like, ‘ooh, this is what I want to do.’”
In professional wrestling, the winner and loser are predetermined, unlike traditional sports.
“Pro wrestling, I will say, is like a dance,” Peters said.
But there’s nothing fake about the pain wrestlers endure, what they call “bumps.”
“Any time you get put down on the mat, you’re taking a bump. You’re hitting the top of your back,” Peters said. “Higher on your neck, sometimes, (is) not good.”
Maggie wrestles in independent shows across the Midwest under the ring name Maggie Lee. She also performs in front of thousands in TNA Wrestling as the villainous character “M By Elegance.”
“Yeah, I do like being the bad guy,” Peters said. “I’ve worked a mix of both the bad guy and the good guy on the independents. But everybody was like, ‘you look more like you as the bad guy.’ I was like, ‘gee, thanks,” Peters said.
TNA – Total Nonstop Action – is high-level televised professional wrestling, one step below WWE.
“I actually really love the whole TV aspect. It’s very organized. Being able to see myself on TV is really cool,” Peters laughed.
Maggie hopes a full-time contract with WWE is next. She’s banking on it, writing a card to her mother labeled “open when I’m in the WWE.”
“And it was one of many letters. I made them for her birthday,” Peters said.
When asked about the letter’s contents, Peters said she doesn’t remember what she wrote as a girl.
“I don’t even remember what’s in it, so I’m kind of like scared,” she said. “When she does open it, I feel like it’s going to be a big deal and I might get embarrassed.”
Sometimes she’s flying high, sometimes she’s taking bumps.
Either way, she’s racing towards her dream.
Copyright 2025 KCRG. All rights reserved.
OMAHA (KMTV) — She might have a new name, but Norah (Sis) Tebrake still brings the same infectious smile to the court.
The former CU volleyball star is now married to former Creighton baseball standout Dylan Tebrake.
“He’s always encouraging me and challenging me,” said Norah. “And I try to do the same for him. I think it’s such a cool dynamic.”
After spending her first pro season helping Orlando to a league title, Norah had now returned to Omaha to play for the Supernovas. But returning to her hometown actually did take some getting used to again.
“I’m a wimp when it comes to the cold,” Tebrake said. “But now coming back after spending just one winter away, I feel like I can’t handle the cold.”
Along with reuniting with some former Bluejays, Tebrake has also formed friendships with her former rivals and now current teammates, including ex-NU star Merritt Beason.
“She’s just so joyful and leads with so much grace and so much love,” said Beason. “You can see that in her play. She’s one of the best people that I’ve ever met and it’s been so fun getting to know her.”
“To have people that know just kind of what makes you tick and what you need on the court and off the court is super helpful,” Tebrake said. “Obviously we’re all learning that about each other but just to come in knowing that there’s people that already know that about me has been super comforting.”
The Novas host San Diego in the season opener on Thursday at 7 PM at CHI Health Center.
Jan. 7, 2026, 4:01 a.m. ET
After a strong 2024 fall season, high school girls volleyball on the South Shore had an even better one in 2025.
There were two local state-championship-winning teams on the court this year. Oliver Ames finished off the best season in program history by winning it’s first-ever Division 2 state title in it’s second ever appearance (which came last season). On the same day, East Bridgewater followed that up with a program-first of their own, winning it’s first-ever Division 4 state championship in it’s first appearance.
Jan. 7, 2026, 4:05 a.m. CT
The high school volleyball season in the Montgomery area ended in late October with two area teams making pushes for state finals in Class 4A and 5A.
Prattville Christian and Montgomery Catholic ultimately fell short in the respective title matches, but it highlighted what was a successful season in the Montgomery area.
What made the high school volleyball season successful in the Montgomery area was the talent on the court.
With the calendar year turning to 2026, the Montgomery Advertiser wants to hear from the readers on which player is the best in the Montgomery area. Voting will last through Jan. 14 till noon.
2025 Montgomery area volleyball player of the year nominees
Joi McGuire, Montgomery Catholic
McGuire recorded 448 kills in the 2025 season despite the fact that she’s considered undersized at her position at 5-foot-6. McGuire was a well-rounded player on the court, not only did she chip in on the offensive side, but she contributed 512 digs on the season.
Kaci Armistead, Montgomery Academy
Armistead reached the milestone of 1,000-career digs and broke the school record in the 2025 season. Her defensive expertise led to 648 digs and 70 assists on the year. From the serving line, Armistead landed 108 aces to round out her performance.
Baylee Rogers, Prattville Christian
Rogers became the first player in school history to record 5,000 assists, landing on the AHSAA leaderboard at sixth in career assists. In the 2025 season alone, Rogers contributed 1,247 assists along with three other state lines that touched triple digits.
Elaisa Vazquez, Pike Road
As a setter, Vazquez checked all the boxes necessary in the 2025 season, grabbing 405 assists and 206 digs. Vazquez chipped in on the scoreboard with 48 kills and 26 aces, winning Pike Road’s Hard Hat award for the 2025 season.
Ellie Causey, Trinity Presbyterian
Causey played her role as a setter for the Wildcats very well, notching 890 assists and 283 digs in the 2025 season. Causey brought her career totals to 1978 assists, 525 digs, 140 aces and 121 kills.
Kaylin Corley, St. James
Corley averaged 14.7 kills per match and 13.8 digs per match in the 2025 season, and is just shy of 2,000 career digs and has over 1,500 career kills after the 2025 season.
Vote for the 2025 Montgomery area volleyball player of the year
PORTLAND, Ore. — The Portland State volleyball program added an experienced setter to its 2026 roster in Asya Akbulut Tuesday.
Akbulut, a native of Ankara, Turkey, will be a senior for the Vikings this coming fall after spending her first three years at Southern Utah (one year) and Eastern Arizona (two years).
Akbulut led Southern Utah with 5.0 assists per set last season when she ranked seventh in the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) in the category. As a sophomore at Eastern Arizona, Akbulut averaged 5.16 assists and 0.42 aces per set when she was named to the Arizona Community College Athletic Conference D1 All-Region First Team.
“Asya has the experience and skills to have an impact on our program immediately,” Portland State head volleyball coach Michael Seemann said. “She has reliable hands and location and understands how to put her hitters in good situations.”
Akbulut joins a setter group that includes returning starter Ava Blascziek and junior Elisabeth Levick.
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