Current Students: MA Literature
Stefanie Ask is a first-year English Literature graduate student who is getting her degree part-time online so that she can continue living the dream teaching high school English and theater in Coupeville, Washington, on beautiful Whidbey Island. Her future plans are to use this degree and deeper subject knowledge to push her students even further, to get involved in local community theater, and to create the best hard cider from her apple trees that you’ve ever tasted.
Judy Campos is currently a second-year graduate student at NAU in the Master’s Literature program studying American Literature. Before joining NAU she worked as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in California, Japan, and on a cruise ship. She is currently the Teacher Liaison for the Graduate English Organization (GEO).
Madison Fowler-Niblock is currently pursuing her MA in Literature. Her interests broadly include gender, sexuality, feminism, and critical race studies in multiethnic American literature and Indigenous literature. She is also interested in portrayals of the working-class in American literature. Madison entered the Master’s program in Fall of 2019 and plans to complete her MA by December of 2020. Madison has always loved exploring feminism in various realms of literature and attended the 2019 National Undergraduate Literature Conference in Ogden, UT, to present her paper “White, Wealthy, and Undeniably Privileged: Issues with Inclusivity in Wonder Woman of the 1960s and 1970s,” where she explored gender, sexuality, and the exclusion of people of color as positive and present characters in this era of Wonder Woman comics. Madison is from Arkansas but currently lives in Eugene, OR, with her husband, Barrett, and their two cats, Alice and Fitzgerald.
Claire Kolling is a California Bay Area native, and is completing her MA in= Literature online full-time. She expects to graduate in December 2020. She is currently an adjunct professor of English at Foothill College, and with this degree she plans to transition into teaching college full-time, after having taught high school for four years. While attending UCLA, Claire completed a Bachelor’s degree in English with a Creative Writing Concentration in Poetry, and completed a Creative English Honors Thesis. She self-published her thesis titled Stopped at a Green Light, which is a collective memoir comprised of vignettes detailing some of the most important moments from her life, and mirrors the style of The House on Mango Street. While teaching high school, Claire was the club advisor to Lean-In and helped create The Pink Box Initiative, a movement aimed at providing free sanitary products to girls on campus, and aimed at destigmatizing the menstrual cycle for boys and girls alike.
Currently a second-year Graduate Teaching Assistant, Myles Lum is a MA-Literature student investigating how the concept of sincerity plays a pivotal role in various pieces of literature. After graduating from the Honors College of UNLV in warm Las Vegas, NV, he moved to snowy Flagstaff, AZ, where he has enjoyed working with his cohort. He has presented with a panel at Arizona State University’s Composition Conference about the Occasional Paper taught in ENG105 and ENG205. Interweaving Pixar (his favorite movie studio) with materials in his classes, Myles hopes to further his journey to become an engaging, expressive, sometimes whimsical instructor.
Todd Spooner is a student in the MA Literature program. He has a B.S. in Economics from Northern Illinois University. He recently presented “Dreiser’s Naturalism: The Interplay of Journalism and Determinism in Sister Carrie” at the American Literature Association Conference in 2019. His creative publications (under the name T. M Spooner) include “Shooting Stars in Omaha” (The Almagre Review 2017-2018), Notes from Exile (Floricanto Press, 2006), and The Salvation of La Purísima (Floricanto Press, 2004).
Stephanie Tanke is a first-year MA English Literature student, with a focus in gender identity and young adult literature. She received her BA in English Literature from ASU in 2017, and holds an Associate’s Degree in Dance Performance from Pima Community College in Tucson, AZ. She has worked as an editorial assistant in the past, and pursued an independent study in gender identity, which led to her current interests in academia. She studied abroad at Oxford University in the summer of 2016 and was published by the Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Currently, Stephanie works as a writing assistant and English 105 instructor at Northern Arizona University and plans to pursue a PhD in the near future. She is the Marketing Coordinator for the Graduate English Organization (GEO). In her free time, she adores reading, traveling, dancing, and her puppy, Mila.