Before coming to St. Jerome’s University, I earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in English at Warner Pacific College and Portland State University, both located in Portland, Oregon. I then headed to University of British Columbia, and completed an interdisciplinary master’s degree in literature and theology at Regent College. These interests followed me to the University of Iowa, where I finished a PhD in twentieth-century American literature with an emphasis in religious thought and environmental humanities.
I teach courses in modern and contemporary American literature, as well as courses in genre studies and literary criticism. In Modern American Literature (ENGL 344), I encourage students to examine relationships between literary production and the turbulent history of the United States from 1900-1945, a period of artistry and reform that depicts people and places shaped by westward migration, the Great Depression, and international wars. In American Literature Since 1945 (ENGL 347), students explore how the civil rights movement, environmentalism, and feminism have been shaped by contemporary American writers. We also consider how postmodern styles of writing are used to remember and enact traumatic events such as the Vietnam War, indigenous colonization, and anxieties that come with living in exile.
I am currently working on a couple of projects. I’m editing a book of selected letters between Jane Kenyon, Alice Mattison, and Joyce Peseroff. In addition, I’m also working on a book titled Geographies of Reclamation: Writing and Water in the Columbia River Basin. Using regional archives, environmental history, bioregional theory, and the geography of the watershed itself, I am mapping ways that prose and poetry written about the Columbia River Basin has shaped cultural attitudes, spiritual practices, and environmental policies in the Pacific Northwest for more than 150 years. I also enjoy working as an Associate Editor for The Raymond Carver Review.
Considering studying English at St. Jerome’s University? Listen to Chad Wriglesworth discuss how art and literature impact how we view the world in his "Two Minute Lecture".