Meridian Community College English instructor Amanda Thompson has been named the college’s 2025 Humanities Teacher of the Year, and as part of the honor, Thompson will present the talk, “Stories that Save Us: Teaching Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust,” on Friday, Feb. 21, at 9:30 a.m. in McCain Theater on the MCC campus.

Thompson, who has taught at MCC for 12 years, will explore the impact of Wiesel’s little-known story “The Watch,” and how it helps students connect with the Holocaust on a personal level.

“In the story, Jews in a small town prepare to board trains to Auschwitz. Before leaving, they bury their valuables, believing they will return,” Thompson said. “Wiesel later writes that the town became a cemetery, and its residents, gravediggers. Twenty years later, he returns and finds everything unchanged—except the Jews are gone.”

Her passion for teaching the Holocaust stems from Wiesel’s fears that future generations would forget its history. “He wrote in 1970 that adolescents were beginning to dismiss the past. His words haunted him, and they should haunt us,” Thompson said. “By teaching this history, I ensure my students cannot say they have never heard of Auschwitz.”

She hopes her presentation will show how literature connects people to experiences beyond their own.

“I want listeners to see that literature is an active force in the world and how it connects them to people and places they will never know or see, but it can still change them. As they bear witness to other people’s stories, they can interpret and understand their own lives better. I believe teaching Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust enables this generation to hear and see and understand not only the past but also their future,” she said.

A Starkville native, Thompson earned her undergraduate degree in secondary English education and a master’s in English from Mississippi State University. Before joining MCC, she taught high school English at Northeast High School and worked as an adjunct instructor at Mississippi State University-Meridian.

“I always loved reading, writing, and my high school English teachers,” Thompson said. “Teaching teenagers—who are funny, full of life, and so full of possibility—seemed like an adventure to me. And it has been.”

She and her husband, Josh, have been married for 18 years and have four children: Ryan, 15; River, 13; Emma, 9; and Lucy Hope, 4.

The presentation is free and open to the public. The Mississippi Humanities Council sponsors the award and recognizes the contribution of humanities faculty at each of the state’s colleges and universities.

For more information, visit meridiancc.edu.