English M.A. Program
Student Achievements

Graduate Student Activities & Accomplishments

Master's Degree in English Alumni

Graduate Student Achievements 2001-2002

Graduate Student Activities & Accomplishments

We are proud of the impressive contributions our graduate students have made as scholars and creative writers. Graduate students have published their scholarly writing in journals such as Film Quarterly, Journal of African Travel Writing, Journal of Popular Culture, and Narrative Inquiry; and their creative work in Beacon Street Review, Creative Nonfiction, Switched-on Gutenberg, and Willow Springs. Our graduate students' writing has also won special mention in the Atlantic Monthly's writing contests.

Graduate students have participated in national and international conferences, presenting their scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work at well-known conventions such as the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) convention, College Composition and Communication Conference (CCCC), and the regional Modern Language Association (MLA) conventions. In addition to their national scholarly and creative accomplishments, graduate students are very active in scholarly, creative, and pedagogical events in the English Department, the University, and Bellingham. Graduate students participated in the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Conference when it met at Western. They have also participated in university and local reading series, colloquia, and symposia. When not presenting their own work, graduate students attend the presentations of the work of English Department faculty, visiting lecturers, and nationally known scholars and writers such as Sherman Alexie, Gloria Anzaldua, Elaine Brown, Cornel West, and Heather McHugh.

Individual graduate students have also brought their inventive energies to Department and University cultures. For instance, one graduate student co-created the feminist performance group, We're Not Your Mother; another organized a gay/lesbian film series; and another designed a web site, titled Virtual Ink, for his English 101 class that featured web-based discussion groups, real time chat, and links to student web pages.

English Department Graduate Student Achievements 2001-2002

• Ryan Adams (MA 2001) is the Director of the Writing Center at the University of Washington at Bothell.
  

• Steven Beech (MA 1999) is completing his doctorate at Southwest Louisiana State University.  He has recently won 2nd prize for fiction and 3rd prize for poetry in the Louisiana Association of College Composition Awards contest.
  

• Cathlina Bergman (MA expected 2002) is the winner of the Marjory riverrun Graduate Student Teaching Award for 2002. She also participated as an Artist in Residence with the Reflections program at Happy Valley Elementary School, where she created and led a poetry and a fiction writing workshop for children.
  

• Jim Brotherton (MA 1997), who works as a technical writer at Microsoft, has had his short story, "Heatstroke," accepted by the Gettysburg Review. It will appear in the August 2002 special Noir issue.
  

• Mary Edwards (MA 2001) works as a technical writer at Anvil Corporation in Bellingham.
  

• Mike Falcone (MA expected 2002) has accepted a position as technical writer in Bellevue, Washington.
  

• Victoria Forester (MA 2001) teaches literature and composition at Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, Connecticut.
  

• Kati Hallenbeck-Tilley (MA 2001) teaches English literature at Lake Stevens High School.
  

• Richard Henry (MA expected 2003) has had his paper ÒMidcentury: A Reassessment of the Work of John Dos Passos as Informed by the Shifting Ideological Paradigms of the Critical CommunityÓ accepted for the American Literature Post-1865 panel at this year's PAMLA conference to be held at Western in November 2002.
  

• Jason Herman (MA 2001) will enter the doctoral program in medieval studies at the  University of Arizona in fall 2002.
  

• Cynthia Hollenbeck (MA expected 2002) has been accepted into the MFA program in poetry at the University of Idaho. She was also nominated for the AWP introductory awards for poetry, and was additionally named a finalist in The Ledge's annual chapbook contest.
  

• Melissa Holmes (MA 1998) has been awarded tenure at Columbia Basin College.
  

• Kate Miller (MA expected 2002) is the winner of the Marjory riverrun Graduate Student Teaching Award for 2002.
  

• Julie O'Donnell Moore (MA 1995) has been awarded tenure at Green River Community College.
  

• Wendy Olsen (MA 1999) has been accepted into the PhD program in English at the University of Denver.  She was awarded a full teaching assistantship and a Colorado Fellowship for exceptional doctoral candidates.  At Denver, she will specialize in rhetoric composition.
  

• Bill Pore (MA expected 2002) has been awarded a full teaching assistantship to the PhD program in English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook beginning fall 2002.
  

• Tanya Rowe's (MA expected 2002) poem "stomach sleeper" was accepted for publication in the journal So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art published by George Mason University.  It appeared in the Winter 2002 issue.
  

• Rebecca Saxton (MA expected 2002) has had her paper "Who Are We to Say Who We Are?: The Politics of Presenting Identity in Filipino American Literature" accepted for the MELUS panel at this year's PAMLA conference to be held at Western in November 2002.  Her pieces Mail Order Bride, Real Life, and Sacrificial Acts have been accepted for publication in the second volume of the Katipunan Literary Journal, to be released this summer by The University of Hawaii.
  

• Kami Westhoff (MA expected 2002) has been accepted into the PhD program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst beginning fall 2002.  Her short story "Warming the Blanket that Covers You" has been accepted and is forthcoming in the Hawai'i Pacific Review.
  

• Tommy Zurhellen (MA 1999) is completing his MFA thesis, "Tommy Zurhellen Sings Songs of Love," in the MFA program at the University of Alabama, where he also edits the program literary magazine.

Master's Degree in English Alumni

After the completion of their MA degrees, our students have been very successful in pursuit of their goals. Students who have received the MA in English from our program have gone to MFA and PhD programs with full fellowships at Arizona State, Columbia, Iowa, State University of New York at Buffalo, New Mexico, Temple University, University of Arizona, University of California/Riverside, University of Southern California, University of Washington, Virginia, and Washington State University, among other schools. Others have received tenure-track teaching appointments at Northwest community colleges such as Columbia Basin Community College, Green River Community College, Highline Community College, Skagit Valley Community College, and South Puget Sound Community College. Still other graduates are very successfully employed as technical writers for Boeing, Microsoft, and Nike, among other companies.