Brenda Arrington Poss joined the Emmanuel College Department of Music as adjunct music faculty in 2006 after thirty-one years of teaching music in Georgia’s public schools.
At Emmanuel, she conducts the Emmanuel Chorale and teaches Music Education and Church Music courses. Mrs. Poss is the Director of Music at Central Presbyterian Church in Athens. In 2005 she was selected for two study seminars presented and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). She studied the role of music in the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama, and the music and culture of the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. In 2004, she was selected by NEH from a national pool of applicants to study Mozart in Vienna, Austria. In 1999, she was a semi-finalist for Georgia Teacher of the Year. Prior to her NEH awards, she was selected as a Fulbright Memorial Fund (1999) recipient to study Japanese schools and culture in Tokyo and Kushiro, Japan, and twice was an exchange teacher to Germany under the auspices of the State of Georgia Department of Education.
Mrs. Poss took her Bachelor of Music, Master of Music Education, and Education Specialist degrees from the University of Georgia. She is in frequent demand as a piano accompanist and festival adjudicator.
Married to C. Thomas Poss, who is a retired teacher of Classics at UGA, they have two adult children: Charlotte, who is a public school music teacher, and Geoffrey, who graduated from UGA in 2009 as a German major and is employed as a professional photographer.