Faculty & Staff Directory

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  • Resident Instructor of Ceramics | Communication, Media & Design Arts | sobecksm@plu.edu | 253-535-5035 | Sobeck is a well-known ceramics artist with a following among students who seek him out and collectors hoping to acquire his distinctive work.

    graduate of PLU in ’72, his career path has led him through various teaching jobs as well as art and design studios. He returned to PLU to teach in 2000, and many of his students have since moved on to their own creative and teaching careers. A quote that describes his outlook is in Henry Glassie’s 1999 book The Potter’s Art (Indiana University Press): “It is good to be a potter. At work, the potter manages the transformation of nature, building culture while fulfilling the self, serving society and

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  • 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.

    , my job is to support each writer’s individual inquiry into their art, and to inhabit as a reader the negative capability Keats wrote of so beautifully, “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I strive to supply accurate description of what’s been achieved by the work at hand, and then to ask artful questions that facilitate honest self-reflection and rewriting as re-visionary work. In counterpoint to supporting artist-led inquiry, I offer a capacious sense of literary history and

  • Poetry | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | Geffrey Davis is the author of three books of poems, most recently One Wild Word Away (BOA Editions 2024).

    prosody that is grounded in the synergetic relationship between reading and creativity. But the art of writing (like thinking) is an ongoing and lived engagement with how our voices and our hands shape and get shaped by the world. That engagement should evolve and thrive beyond the particulars of any single learning context. As such, I think of workshop as an interim where we cultivate habits of mind and sensitivities to craft that a writer can adapt according to their everyday grind and develop

  • 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.

    , serving both young and old, poetry is a guide to deliver us into a fresh engagement with our inner lives and with modernity. If we care about order and disorder, then poetry matters because it is the art of the utterance of beauty and the grotesque. If we care about the deepest aspirations of men and women across every community and culture, language and race, then poetry is always relevant because it is the art of the utterance of what we share in our innermost psyches. Since culture and society

  • Lecturer - Jazz Bass | Music | anderscr@plu.edu | 253-535-7602 | Clipper Anderson is one of the Northwest’s leading bassists.

    Festival, the Highland Jazz Festival, the Fairbanks Summer Art Festival, the Crown of the Continent Guitar Foundation Festival, the Blaine Jazz Festival and the Buddy DeFranco/University of Montana Jazz Festival, the latter four of which he plays annually. He has shared the bandstand with a long list of jazz luminaries including Michael Brecker, Arturo Sandoval, Dave Samuels, Peter Erskine, Bruce Forman, Tamir Hendelman, Bob Mintzer, Lew Soloff, Bucky Pizzarelli, Benny Golson, Paquito D’Rivera, Phil

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  • Lecturer | Music | boazhm@plu.edu | 253-535-7602 | Soprano Holly Boaz enjoys a varied career in opera, oratorio, chamber music, and small ensembles.

    , and in the UK, the Aldeburgh Festival and Caritas Chamber Choir. As a specialist in Baroque repertoire, she frequently performs works of Bach and Handel with regional orchestras and choral ensembles, but she also loves a good romantic art song, especially one in Russian. She is a winner of the Northwest Region of the National Association of Teachers of Singing Artist Award Competition (NATSAA), and the Ladies’ Musical Club of Seattle Competition. She received an encouragement award from the

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  • 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.

    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. In art as in life, we often enough try to dodge what would make us grow because it’s uncomfortable, and

  • Nonfiction | MFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency | Barrie Jean Borich is the author of Apocalypse, Darling (2018), which was short-listed for a Lambda Literary Award.

    Barrie Jean Borich Nonfiction Biography Biography Barrie Jean Borich is the author of Apocalypse, Darling (2018), which was short-listed for a Lambda Literary Award.  PopMatters said “Apocalypse, Darling soars and seems to live as a new form altogether. It’s poetry, a meditation on life as ‘the other,’ creative nonfiction, and abstract art.”  Her memoir Body Geographic (2013) won a Lambda Literary Award in Memoir, and in a starred review Kirkus called the book “…an elegant literary map that

  • Professor Emerita and Faculty Fellow in Humanities | Religion | killenpo@plu.edu | Patricia O’Connell Killen, professor emerita, taught courses in the Department of Religion and in the International Core at PLU from 1989 through 2010.

    ) : View Book Selected Letters of A.M.A. Blanchet, Bishop of Walla Walla and Nesqualy, 1846-1879. Edited with Roberta Stringham Brown. (Seattle: University of Washington Press 2013) : View Book Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone. Primary Editor. Lanham (MD: Alta Mira Press 2004) : View Book Finding Our Voices: Women, Wisdom and FaithFaith (NY: Crossroad Publishing Company 1997) : View Book The Art of Theological Reflection (NY: Crossroad Publishing 1994) : View Book

  • Assistant Professor of Social Work | Department of Social Work | zaman@plu.edu | 253-535-7507 | Hazel Ali Zaman received her PhD in Social Work and Social Research, Graduate Certificate in Gender, Race, and Nations, MEd in Elementary Education, and BS in Child and Family Studies at Portland State University.

    Certificate in Gender, Race, and Nations, MEd in Elementary Education, and BS in Child and Family Studies at Portland State University. Informed by queer and trans of color scholarship, Hazel engages with various interdisciplinary fields, such as transgender studies, performance studies, and critical youth studies, as a way to explore queer and trans of color life through embodied art, music, and performance. Hazel’s current teaching and research interests include queer and trans wellness, healthcare

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