“We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society." -- Martin Luther King, Jr. 

I am originally from Bristol, Tennessee, and graduated from King College as a traditional undergraduate in 1995 with a degree in Political Science/History. After forgoing law school, I spent a gap year living in Vail, Colorado before moving to Knoxville, Tennessee to start graduate school at the University of Tennessee. Yes, I did snow ski a lot while I lived in Vail; and, no, I have not been back nor have I snow skied since I left. 

After moving to Knoxville, I began graduate work in the Political Science department at UT with the intention of completing a Master of Public Administration degree (with a concentration in Urban Planning). At the same time, I worked for the university as a production assistant at the Center for Transportation Research in the Southeastern Transportation Center and Tennessee Transportation Assistance Program initiatives, which helped to fuel my interest in pursuing an MPA in planning. When the university decided to eliminate the Urban Planning degree, integrating it into a civil engineering program, I started graduate classes in the English department at UT instead, and I took a new position with the university's Office of Information Technology as a technical writer and editor. During my graduate career at UT, I focused primarily on 19th Century/Victorian and early 20th Century/Modern British literature, with an interest in the works of Wilkie Collins, Anne Bronte, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, William Thackeray, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. I completed my work in the spring of 2002, culminating in a thesis that studied three British women and their travel writings, letters, poetry, art work, and journal entries, stemming from my desire for non-fiction, archival-based research, rather than literary criticism or theoretical analysis. 

In 2006, while an adjunct for the Department of English at UT, I was offered a full-time corporate position as a marketing coordinator for the Midsouth region of an international engineering firm. This opportunity, coincidentally, ended up taking me almost full-circle back to my Center for Transportation Research days at UT, since this firm concentrated in civil and environmental engineering and planning related to multi-level transportation projects. During my time there, I worked on several large-scale projects with the firm, including the monumental SmartFIX40 interstate realignment/reconstruction project through downtown Knoxville. 

In 2010, I left the engineering firm and returned to teaching part-time at Tusculum College in their GPS program in Knoxville. Primarily, I taught courses and workshops in rhetoric and composition, research and writing, and business/professional communication. In the fall of 2011, I also began teaching part-time at both Pellissippi State Community College and King College, taking on a number of the Quest classes in the Knoxville area. In the spring of 2014, I started full-time at King University as the Assistant Director of the ACE in Knoxville, making myself available to help students in all of the programs in the area with their written communication, oral communication, and research writing projects. I am also the course writer/owner for a LIBS/ENGL Quest course as well as a TCOM course in professional communication for the Information Technology program, which are very thought-provoking, enjoyable, and rewarding endeavors for me.

When I'm not working on campus, I live on a farm in East Knoxville with a number of shelter dog rescues, several cats, and two horses (for right now). Currently, I compete one of my horses, Eddie, in an equestrian sport called 3-day eventing that incorporates the three disciplines of dressage, cross-country, and stadium jumping into one multi-phase competition. This occupies much of my free time and is a life-long passion. I have found that people who ride horses as youngsters either grow out of it, or they don't. I definitely have not! I also enjoy reading a lot. I am intrigued by the literary genres of the Victorian gothic and the more contemporary area of Steampunk fiction, but I do not get -- at all -- the current cultural fascination with vampires, werewolves, aliens, and zombies. 

M.A. English (The University of Tennessee), 2002. Thesis: The Artist’s Loving Hand: The Travel Letters of Emily Eden, Isabella Bird, and Mother Catherine McAuley Written to Their Sisters in 19th Century Britain and Ireland      

B.A. Political Science/History (King College), 1995

“Finding Their Voices: How a Library-Writing Center Partnership Helps Non-Traditional Students Join the Academic Conversation,” at 2015 Appalachian College Association Summit, (October 2015). *Co-presented with Justin Eastwood, Outreach Services Librarian at the King University Knoxville campus

“ ‘To Hang For Ever Over…’ ”: The Conflicting Representations of Justice in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” at The 31st Annual 20th Century Literature Conference, The University of Louisville (February 2003)

“As Far as the Eye Can See: An Introduction to Late 18th – Early 19th Century British Women’s Travel Writing,” at Blue Ridge International Conference on the Humanities and the Arts, Appalachian State University (April 2002)

“Seeing Eye to Eye: Methods of Tutoring in the Writing Center from the Perspective of a Graduate Student Tutor,” at East Central Writing Center Association Conference, Kent State University – Stark (March 2002)

“Fire and Light: Ghosts, Memory, and the Search for Freedom in Tennessee Williams’ The Two-Character Play and Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” at Madison Conference 2002, James Madison University (March 2002)