Adjunct Instructor of English

M.A. East Carolina University

During my time at NCWC, I have really enjoyed the small classroom sizes and getting to know my students better. One of the things that I believe to be true about writing is that it can be accessible to all students, no matter their background or their previous experience in writing. My courses focus on the building blocks of writing, from grammar and punctuation all the way through crafting and refining thesis statements for research papers. As a creative writer, I believe that artistic writing has enormous value within the academic setting and that all students have the ability and right to express their true voices within the classroom setting. Therefore, many aspects of the classroom will reflect Expressivist Pedagogy, which utilizes creative, free-write assignments to allow students to develop their own authentic style and individual voice in writing. Because language is the key to the mind, reflective essays that are focused on content and meaning rather than adhering to formalities required of most academic essays will allow students to be the authors of their own learning. This teaching style will also allow students to discover new insights in a non-traditional manner as they can employ various mediums to convey and rhetorically situate information.

My research interests include nonfiction literature, particularly journals and memoirs, that focus on mental illness. My thesis compared the memoirs of Marya Hornbacher to the unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath, and traced the similarities in language, syntax, and diction between the two, noting that their experiences with depression and mania have linguistic similarities. I have also authored several award-winning essays and poems, most notably an ecofeminist analysis of Gulliver’s Travels and a semi-finalist poem about nostalgia and memory entitled “Hometown Lessons.”

• ENG 112: Writing II
• ENG 111: Writing I
• ENG 090: Basic Reading and Writing