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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.     .

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.

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.

Philosophy Department | College of Liberal Studies | menzelpt@plu.edu | Taught philosophy at Pacific Lutheran University from 1971 to 2012, having been educated at Wooster, Yale, and Vanderbilt.  Teaching widely in philosophy and cross-disciplinary curricula, he has also published specialized scholarly work in health care ethics, including two books on moral questions in health care economics, numerous articles on health system structure and health care reform, and a recently co-edited volume (2012) on the tension between treatment and prevention in health policy.  Courses in the last decade of his teaching include Biomedical Ethics, Human Identity and Bioethics, Health and Social Justice, Business Ethics, Human Rights, and The Nature of Human Well-Being. He also served Pacific Lutheran University in various administrative positions, including Provost.  He retired to Professor Emeritus in summer 2012. .

Chair, Department of Economics | Department of Economics | nagyka@plu.edu | 253-535-7085 | Krisztina Nagy (n-odge as in Dodge like the car) is an experienced teacher and researcher focusing on international economics and econometric analysis.  She is passionate about teaching her craft to both undergraduate and graduate students and she especially enjoys guiding students to see the interconnectedness of today’s world.  Dr.

Poetry | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | David Biespiel is a contributing writer at The Rumpus, Partisan, American Poetry Review, Politico, New Republic, Slate, Poetry, and The New York Times, among other publications.  He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Charming Gardeners and The Book of Men and Women, which was chosen one of the Best Books of the Year by the Poetry Foundation and received the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry.  His books of essays include A Long High Whistle: Selected Columns on Poetry and a book on creativity, Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces.  He is a member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle.  Recipient of Lannan, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner fellowships, he has taught at Stanford University, University of Maryland, George Washington University, Portland State University, and Wake Forest University, in addition to other colleges and universities.  He is a longtime faculty member in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University and is the founder of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters in Portland. Mentor.

MSW Fellow, Health Navigator | Wellbeing Services and Resources | logan.denen@plu.edu | Logan is a PLU BS Psychology graduate and a current PLU MSW student graduating in 2026. .

WSR Student Worker | Wellbeing Services and Resources | hayesmr@plu.edu | Melaina is a current student at PLU and will be part of the graduating class of 2025.

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.

Lecturer - Tuba | Music | evansmp@plu.edu | 253-535-7602 | Paul Evans is the Principal Tuba of the Tacoma Symphony Orchestra and Lecturer of Tuba at Pacific Lutheran University.  An active performer in the Pacific Northwest, Paul also performs with the Northwest Sinfonietta, Bellevue Philharmonic, Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra, and with the Lyric Brass at PLU.  He studied tuba performance with Ron Munson in Seattle, Steve Call at Brigham Young University, and Gary Ofenloch at the University of Utah.  Before coming home to the Pacific Northwest, Paul was Principal Tuba of the Boise Philharmonic and played frequently with the Utah Symphony.  He performs regularly as a soloist and chamber musician and has been soloist with the Boise Philharmonic, Tacoma Symphony, and Lyric Brass. .