What is your educational background?
- Ph.D. Composition/TESOL, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
- M.A. English, Slippery Rock University
- B.S. Writing, Slippery Rock University
What specific courses or specialties do you teach?
I teach Screenwriting, Writing for the Media, Journalism, Film History and Theory, Christian Faith and Cinema, and Principles of Media.
What is the most important piece of advice you give students to help them succeed?
God has created you with a set of talents- your best path to success is to develop these and use them in your career. In the classroom, I try to encourage students to pursue these areas in papers, internships, and other work so they can see their unique ability to contribute to various fields of communication and media.
Selected Publications
- Novels: Picking Daisy (2017), Forgiving Tess (2019), Lucy in Love (2020), Winning Casey (2020), Pushing Robby (2020), Her Best Bo (2020).
- Article in Kairos, a review of a CCCC’s panel presentation titled G.31 “Tweeting, Timelines, and Transfer: Opening the Composition Classroom to Students’ Social Media Literacies,” 2015.
- Chapter in ‘Refocus: The Films of Amy Heckerling’- “Clueless Times at the Ferris Bueller Club: A critical analysis of the directorial work of Amy Heckerling and John Hughes,” 2016.
- Three seasonal film articles published in local newspaper (Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Christmas movie collections), Butler Eagle (Butler, PA), 2013.
- Poetry in Digging in the Dirt, 2012.
- Articles on Hal Roach and Sam Warner for Salem Press, EBSCO Publishing, 2012.