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Professor of English | Department of English | marcusls@plu.edu | 253-535-7312 | Lisa Marcus joined the English department after completing a PhD in English at Rutgers University in 1995.  She has been active in campus-wide diversity education and advocacy; she chaired the Gender, Sexuality, and Race Studies program for many years, and is a founding member of PLU’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program.  She is deeply committed to first year education and regularly teaches a popular writing seminar on Banned Books for the First Year Experience Program.  Her constellation of courses in the English department include:  The Holocaust in the American Literary Imagination; American Literature 1914-45: Race, Sex, and War; Anne Frank as a Holocaust Icon; a senior seminar on History & Memory in US Slavery and Holocaust texts; an English Studies course on Gendered Literacy; Feminist Approaches to Literature; Women Writers and the Body Politic; and a first-year seminar on Holocaust Literature developed with Professor Rona Kaufman.  Lisa also regularly teaches courses in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Race Studies Programs. Her current research project is Snapshots of a Daughter:  A Feminist Genealogy, a critical exploration of letters between Marcus’s mother and the poet Adrienne Rich, 1979-82. You can read a poem she published about visiting Auschwitz here.     .

School of Business | sweberva@plu.edu | Vic Sweberg has been an Adjunct Professor in the Pacific Lutheran University’s School of Business from 2013 to the present.  He has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate-level courses.  Prior to 2013, he had a successful career with The Boeing Company for nearly 30 years.  At Boeing, he served in many capacities and held assignments in program management, strategy development, business development, and leading a variety of innovative growth areas.   As an Executive during the latter part of his career, he formed and led a new division inside of Boeing, the Unmanned Airborne Systems (UAS) division, reporting to the President of Boeing Military Aircraft.

Poetry | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017).  Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, Waxwing, and elsewhere.  Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship.  She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo.  She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.

Master of Business Administration | sweberva@plu.edu | Vic Sweberg has been an Adjunct Professor in the Pacific Lutheran University’s School of Business from 2013 to the present.  He has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate-level courses.  Prior to 2013, he had a successful career with The Boeing Company for nearly 30 years.  At Boeing, he served in many capacities and held assignments in program management, strategy development, business development, and leading a variety of innovative growth areas.   As an Executive during the latter part of his career, he formed and led a new division inside of Boeing, the Unmanned Airborne Systems (UAS) division, reporting to the President of Boeing Military Aircraft.

Poetry, Nonfiction | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | Brian Teare, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Companion Grasses and Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia.

Nonfiction, Poetry | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | Lia Purpura is the author of eight collections of essays, poems, and translations, most recently, Rough Likeness (essays) and It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (poems).  Her honors include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright Fellowships, three Pushcart prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, and the Beatrice Hawley, and Ohio State University Press awards in poetry.  Recent work appears in Agni, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays.  She is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and teaches at writing programs around the country, including, most recently, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference.  She lives in Baltimore with her family. Mentor.

Mental Health Counselor | Counseling Services | guizare@plu.edu | 253-535-7206 | My name is Evelia Guizar; I am a 4th-year student in the Doctorate in Psychology (PsyD) program at Northwest University in Kirkland, WA. My passion for psychological well-being started early in my teenage years as I navigated the complexity of integrating my cultural identity as a first-generation immigrant.  Before becoming a graduate student, I worked in the field of Logistics, focusing on person-to-person interactions and professional relationships. I believe in a holistic approach to therapy to understand the whole person and how life experiences, environments, and situations impact a person’s well-being.  I embrace and respect diversity in cultural values, which make each client unique in their perspectives and experiences.  I believe that we all experience moments in our lives where a therapeutic relationship helps promote healing and emotional strength as we navigate challenges in our daily life. .

Professor of Theatre | Theatre & Dance | smithtt@plu.edu | 253-535-7323 | Tom Smith is a playwright, director and improviser.  His plays are published by Samuel French, Playscripts, and YouthPLAYS, among others.  Monologues from his plays appear in five collections of works, and his short plays have been produced internationally.  His work has been enjoyed by audiences in cities across the U.S., including Seattle, Kansas City, San Francisco, and Chicago, as well as in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.  Tom is also the author of The Other Blocking: Teaching and Performing Improvisation(Kendall Hunt) and articles and reviews for Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, The Players Journal, and several resource books.  Tom graduated from Whitman College with a BA in Dramatic Arts and Secondary Education certification, and earned his MFA in Directing from University of Missouri-Kansas City.  He is a proud member of the Dramatist’s Guild and Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. .

Resident Assistant Professor of Theatre, Costume Designer, Costume Shop Manager | Theatre & Dance | anderskw@plu.edu | 253-535-7326 | Kathleen Anderson has been a member of the design faculty in the PLU Theatre Program since 1998.

Professor of English | Department of English | barotrp@plu.edu | 253-535-7318 | Rick Barot has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A.