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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.

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.

Associate Professor of English | Department of English | jamesja@plu.edu | 253-535-7217 | Jenny James was born and raised in Michigan, the home of the Great Lakes and the Michigan Wolverines.

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.

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.     .

Professor Emeritus and Faculty Fellow in Humanities | Religion | torvensa@plu.edu | 253-535-8106 | Samuel Torvend teaches courses in the history of early, medieval, and reformation Christianity as well as historical courses on the reform of social welfare, Christian responses to local and global hunger, Christian art and architecture, and Christian rituals.

Associate Professor | School of Business | flickrw@plu.edu | 253-535-7306 | Professor Flick teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses in business law and ethics at Pacific Lutheran University School of Business. Licensed to practice law in California since 1995 and in Washington since 2009, Professor Flick has an undergraduate degree in economics from California State University where he was also a graduate of the University Scholars Program, a juris doctor from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles and a Masters of Business Administration with honors from the University of Southern California.  He also received the mediation and dispute resolution training from the Center for Dialog and Resolution (formerly the Pierce County Center for Dispute Resolution). From 1996 until 2001, Professor Flick served as in-house counsel for a New York Stock Exchange traded mortgage finance company ultimately rising to the level of Senior Counsel responsible for all public company reporting, structured finance and securitization and he also served as the secretary to the Board of Directors.  Professor Flick participated in the drafting and filing of all required disclosures under the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 including Forms 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K and the annual proxy statement.  Professor Flick was part of the management team that was involved in the transactions necessary to recapitalize the business following the credit crises of the late 1990s. From 2001 until 2003, Professor Flick was corporate counsel to a major fashion industry retailer.  In addition to his responsibilities as secretary to the Board of Directors and all public company reporting requirements, Professor Flick played a major role in a trademark financing transaction which was unique at the time.  Professor Flick also was intimately involved in the implementation of the company’s enterprise resource planning system including negotiating the contracts and helping to resolve contractual disputes.  Professor Flick also was part of the team that won a significant victory against a proposed securities class action claim. From 2003 until 2005, Professor Flick was General Counsel of the capital markets division of the largest subprime mortgage company in the United States.  He was responsible for overseeing the legal affairs associated with $10 billion in warehouse financing and over 15 monthly loan sale and securitization transactions.  Professor Flick played a pivotal role in the establishment of one of the first short term commercial paper financing facilities backed by subprime mortgages. From 2005 through 2007, Professor Flick was the Chief Operating Officer of a multi-family and commercial mortgage lender responsible for all non-origination operations as well as legal compliance.  He also was primarily responsible for preparing the company for a successful sale to a bank at an attractive sale price considering economic conditions at the time. Since 2007, Professor Flick has been in private practice both for a large, national law firm working on securitization and structured finance.  Among the transactions on which Professor Flick worked was a unique financing of life settlements.  In his private practice, Professor Flick advises small and medium sized companies as a contract general counsel.  His clients include early stage start-up companies and his largest client has annual revenues of $75 million and over 75 employees. In addition to his professional experience, Professor Flick has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in law, finance, accounting, dispute resolution and other related topics at local for profit institutions and community colleges. Throughout his career, Mr.

Lecturer - Saxophone | Music | steighev@plu.edu | 253-535-7602 | Praised by the Tacoma News Tribune for his “effortless lyricism” as well as his “smooth tone and fluid virtuosity,” saxophonist Erik Steighner has performed with ensembles including the Austin Symphony Orchestra, the Federal Way Symphony, the Northwest Sinfonietta, the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra, the San Antonio Symphony, and Symphony Tacoma.

Contingent Faculty of Marriage and Family Therapy | Marriage and Family Therapy | youngsy@plu.edu | | I have been a part of the PLU family since 2008, where I provide supervision to Master Degree students at the PLU Marriage and Family Therapy Clinic.

Nonfiction | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | Sherry Simpson is the author of Dominion of Bears: Living with Wildlife in Alaska, which received the 2015 John Burroughs Medal for a distinguished book of nature writing, and two collections of essays, The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska and The Way Winter Comes, which won the inaugural Chinook Literary Prize.