Faculty Profile

While my much of my formal training is in creative writing and 20th century American poetry, my teaching interests include composition and rhetoric, literature surveys, and business writing. I also write on confessional poets Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Anne Carson, and am interested in the relationship between confessional poetry and prose memoir.

I believe in the symbiotic relationship between reading and writing, and so students in my writing classes can expect to read widely. Likewise, students in my literature courses write as a way to understand the texts we discuss. I’m also devoted to helping students to understand the relationship between content and form, as it can help them not only to read closely, but to write their own poems, essays, or professional documents.

My essays and reviews on teaching and confessional poets have appeared in Teaching American Literature, The American Encyclopedia of Nature Writing, Aboutaword.com, and Pleiades and have been mentioned in Poets and Writers and Harriet: The Blog of the Poetry Foundation. My poems have appeared in journals such as The Beloit Poetry Journal, Literary Imagination Verse Daily, and Best New Poets: 50 Poems by Emerging Writers.

Education

B.A. St. Norbert College
M.A. Boston University
M.A. The University of Missouri
Ph.D. The University of Missouri