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Catering & 208 Lead Cook | Campus Restaurants - Dining at PLU | alejanja@plu.edu | 253-535-7472 | Javier has been with PLU for over 20 years and has really enjoyed working for an institution with such great community and family values. He met his wife, Heather, here at PLU and in his free time loves spending time with her and their two beautiful daughters and their extended family.     .

Staff Pianist | Music | aboers@plu.edu | 253-535-7602 | Amy Boers is well known as a collaborative pianist, music director, singer, and church musician. As pianist and collaborator, she currently holds positions at Pacific Lutheran University (staff pianist), Symphony Tacoma (principal keyboard), and Symphony Tacoma Voices (pianist and assistant rehearsal conductor).

Fiction | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | Scott Nadelson is the author of four story collections, most recently The Fourth Corner of the World; a memoir, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress; and a novel, Between You and Me.  His stories and essays have appeared in Harvard Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and have been cited as notable in both Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.  Winner of the Oregon Book Award, the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, he teaches at Willamette University and lives in Salem, Oregon. Mentor.

Professor of Chemistry | Department of Chemistry | waldowda@plu.edu | 253-535-7533 | Application of Ring Opening Metathesis Polymermization to Polymer Battery Electrolytes and other membranes Use of macro and microphase separation techniques in energy related materials Statics and kinetics of phase separation in multi-component polymer blends both in bulk and as thin films Physical characterization technique include: light scattering optical and atomic force microscopy neutron scattering Monte Carlo techniques Use of metathesis, anionic, and controlled radical synthetic techniques to produce new materials for macro and microphase separation applications Polymer/structure relationships studied via spin-lattice relaxation measurements of local segmental dynamics in polymers Promoting the teaching and learning of research in an undergraduate setting via incorporation of research activities in traditional courses development of Internet resources for undergraduate research an active and externally funded local undergraduate research program Incorporation of information technology in lecture and laboratory settings .

Visiting Assistant Professor | School of Education | rdelcastillo@plu.edu | Rafael is a Visiting Professor teaching educational methods in science and social studies, integration of technology, and an integrating seminar in the undergraduate and graduate-level teacher education programs.

Fiction | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | April Ayers Lawson is the author of Virgin and Other Stories, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Irish Times and Vice, and a Best Foreign Book of the Year by Spain’s Qué Leer Magazine.  Virgin and Other Stories has been (or will be) translated into German, Spanish, Norwegian, and Italian.  She has received The Plimpton Prize for Fiction, as well as a writing fellowship from The Corporation of Yaddo.   Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Die Welt, ZYZZYVA, and Oxford American, among others, has been cited as notable in Best American Short Stories, featured by Huffington Post, and anthologized in The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review.  Her nonfiction has appeared in Der Spiegel, Granta, Vice, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung Magazine, and been named a Most Popular Read of the Year by Granta.  She has taught in the creative writing programs at Emory University and the University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and now teaches at Clemson University. Mentor.  Workshops and classes in fiction. Statement: “The most important thing your writing can be is interesting.  And by that I mean interesting to you, because when you’re deeply engaged in the process, the work sparks alive.  This level of engagement involves writing into places you didn’t expect and opening to the risk of surprise.

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.

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.