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Professor Emeritus | Earth Science | Brian E.

Visiting Instructor of Hispanic and Latino Studies | Hispanic and Latino Studies | floresja@plu.edu | 253-535-7215

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.     .

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.

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.

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. .

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. .