Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the English department at the University of Utah

I am an associate professor in the English department teaching creative writing and literature courses. We have an undergraduate program in creative writing as well as a well-recognized PhD program, so much of my work is mentoring graduate students on their developing novel and short story manuscripts toward an understanding how their work fits into a larger, longer literary lineage. I also mentor them in teaching and professionalization. I teach courses in speculative fiction, horror, climate and eco-fiction, and narrative theory, as well as conventional fiction workshops. I am also the Director of Graduate Studies for the department of English. In this role, I support graduate students from admission and recruitment through coursework and committee construction and ultimately graduation, managing academic progress, professionalization, job placement, and beyond for over 70 graduate students.

Aside from written feedback for my students' manuscripts and critical assignments in class, I am also constantly writing grants and project proposals to secure funding and support both for my own writing and the university. Also email. So much tricky email correspondence with students and university administrators and community partners and my colleagues. Because my position requires I publish regularly, I am also always in the middle of a novel or short story.

After graduating from GV, I received my MFA from the creative writing program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I taught and completed an internship with Dalkey Archive Press. I spent a year in Los Angeles working in educational publishing before entering the PhD program at the University of Denver. There I taught and worked at a drop-in writing center for unhoused community members in Denver. My first tenure-track job immediately followed graduation from my PhD. I was at the College of Charleston in South Carolina where I taught in the graduate and undergraduate programs in creative writing for three years before heading to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. I earned tenure last year at Utah and am now directing the graduate program in the English department. I'm also an affiliate faculty member in the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program and a volunteer instructor with the University Prison Education Project (UPEP), where I teach creative writing and literature courses to incarcerated students in the Utah State Prison.

So much! My involvement in the Student Reading Series and fishladder literary journal were pivotal in getting my first paid internships (and ultimately jobs) in publishing. I also volunteered at Shawmut Hills Elementary School, which launched my interested in community outreach and literacy off-campus. My experience working as a writing consultant for the Fred Mejier Center for Writing and Michigan Authors was essential in securing teaching positions down the road. I also completed the Writing with Distinction program (which was just getting started the year I graduated) and focussing on fulfilling those criteria my final year at GV were so important in synthesizing what I had learned in the classroom and better preparing me for career prospects early on in my professional life. I also think the mentorship of the faculty was foundational in giving me a model for the kind of professor I aspire to be now.

Get involved in everything. Everything! Your career path might not play out the way you anticipate and having a bit of experience -- even just a little bit -- in a wide variety of areas can be crucial in helping you acquire the kinds of skills that can transfer to a range of career options. I found that the skills I accumulated from both my classes and my extra curricular experiences (all of which were funded and supported by the Writing Department) offered a spectrum of opportunities that I was able to effectively leverage into job offers almost as soon as I graduated. I also found that taking advantage of the range of opportunities the department provides gave me an excellent gauge for what kind of professional writing life I could have and, ultimately, taught me how to cultivate it.