University of Michigan - Flint

Meghan K. Riley received her high school diploma from Mott Middle College High School, and her Associate in Arts with Honors from Charles S. Mott Community College. She is pursuing a double major in English and History, with teacher certification. Her main areas of interest in literature are Science-Fiction and Fantasy, but she loves all literature, and enjoys literary analysis. Her immediate goals for her English degree are to teach English at a middle or high school. At some point she would like to teach at the college level and write professionally. Currently, Meghan has been published in the 2003 Mott Community College Honors Journal, and is awaiting word on three stories that she has sent to Analog and Asimov science-fiction magazines.

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Tammy Lynn Jordan, or Jee Hye Han, (biological name) received her high school diploma from Carman-Ainsworth high school. She has received her Associates from the University of Michigan-Flint, and is "snailing" her way to receive her Bachelor's degree. She was inducted into Sigma Tau Delta on March 16, 2005. She enjoys all kinds of literature, but her favorite is Shakespeare. Her latest publication was in the Academy Letter (In 2004) and she read a paper she had written for English 299 at the Michigan's Academy 2004 meeting on March 5. She hopes to eventually receive her teaching certificate and continue on to receive a counseling certificate at Wayne State University.

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Olivia Alexander-Quinn is a part-time student. She is an English major with a specialization in writing and Pub Admin minor. She was inducted into Sigma Tau in 2003, and is a writer and publisher member with ASCAP. She has written lyrics to songs that have been published and recorded, which received awards from Billboard Magazine. She also writes short stories and poetry. Olivia is currently employed as a secretary/wordprocessor at the State Department of Human Services.

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Jeffrey Alfred Ruth is currently a junior at the University of Michigan-Flint, where he is pursuing the Bachelor of Arts in English degree. Upon graduation, he will continue his academic journey at a graduate school of distinction, hoping to hone, and eventually publish, his personal research on the anthropological implications of cultural/literary folk heroes. Previous honors include the Oakland University Writing Excellence Award (1996). Other literary pursuits and interests include playwriting and the reintroduction of classical morality to childrenís stories and novels.

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Amanda N. Simons graduated Valedictorian from Genesee High School in 2002. She is currently a senior at UM-F, seeking a BA in English (writing) and a BFA in studio art (painting) with an art history minor. She especially is interested in the literary aspect of visual art: the discrepancy of translation between the two fields, and the idea of literary narrative in visual media. An actively exhibiting local painter, Amanda works in series to develop a story or commentary about her subject matter. Her current work focuses on contemporary ideas of womenís beauty, juxtaposing those ideas with the art history canon and contemporary pop culture. After graduation in May of 2007, Amanda will be off to grad school for an MFA in painting.

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Dr. Mary Jo Kietzman has been a professor in the Department since 1996, and she teaches courses in Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, seventeenth-century literature, Greek and Roman classical literature, the criminal culture of early modern England, early modern women writers, and travel literature. After earning a B.A. in English from The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, she decided to pursue a Ph.D. at Boston College instead of beekeeping in Tunis for the Peace Corps or running a school on an island in Micronesia for the Jesuits. During graduate school, she taught at Boston College and worked at a variety of part-time jobs, from marketing director of an architectural restoration company to bagging groceries at a local supermarket. After earning her Ph.D. in 1993, Dr. Kietzman took a job teaching at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, where she taught Renaissance literature to non-native speakers and learned enough Turkish to participate in the wonderful custom of bartering for every necessary of life at markets and shops and to travel independently. After leaving Turkey, she spent a summer researching the life of the seventeenth-century imposter-princess and criminal, Mary Carleton, on a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar for teachers. She returned and settled in a Boston suburb with a large immigrant community for a couple of intense years of research, writing, and imagining that she was still in Turkey. She moved to Flint in 1996 to study Shakespeare with large groups of students every semester - an aspect of the job which she finds tremendously satisfying -write, and publish her biography of Mary Carleton, marry the school archivist, adopt a lovely daughter from Kazakhstan on her sabbatical, and design a dream course on English travel writing to Muslim countries which she hopes to teach.

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Dr. Kent has been a professor in the English Department at UM-Flint since 2001, and she teaches courses primarily in multicultural literatures (including African American literature, Native American literature, and American ethnic literatures). After earning a B.A. in International Relations and English from Stanford University in 1990, Dr. Kent was a reporter at a daily newspaper in California and then did public relations work. She then went on to earn a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focusing on twentieth century multicultural American literatures.

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