Welcome to my website. I have been a faculty member at Southern Poly since 1999. I received a B.A. degree in English (with teacher certification) from the University of Dayton in 1983. I then taught high school English for six years: three years in Morocco, Indiana, and three years in St. Petersburg, Florida. I received my M.A. (1991) and Ph.D. (1995) from Florida State University where I studied the literature of the American South and rhetoric and composition. In the Spring of 1996, I won the Russell Reaver Award for Outstanding Dissertation in American Literature or Folklore from Florida State University for my dissertation, Separate and Communal Selves: Eudora Welty's Investigations of Human Relationships. At the time of my award I was teaching at Montgomery College in Conroe, Texas where I taught for four years.
I am interested in the intersections between critical theory and rhetoric/composition theory, literature and composition, and the personal and social aspects of writing. I am also interested in the ways in which culture impacts literature, writing, and education. I have been the Director of the University Honors Program at SPSU since the program’s inception in 2003. I like to publish and present papers on issues of honors education, the culture of higher education and its impact on disabled faculty. I also like to research the teaching of composition and the writings of Eudora Welty.
