Faculty Directory A - G

Chris Alexander joined the English Department in 2009 and has served as the Program Director for Creative Writing since 2012. He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University and a Ph.D. in American Literature from The University at Buffalo, with a dissertation project on the nineteenth-century roots of modern and postmodern literature. His interests include Western Esotericism and the occult roots of literary Modernism; constraint-based writing, Georges Perec and the OULIPO; Actor Network Theory; and queer theory. His publications include Panda (Truck Books 2010), Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004 by Tan Lin: Chinese Edition (4 vols., Edit Publications 2010), Panda 2nd Ed. (Truck Books 2012), McNugget (Troll Thread Press 2013), Unearthed (Gauss PDF 2015), and CAMS (Troll Thread Press 2016). He is faculty co-mentor of the student Creative Writing Club.

Nancy Berke received her Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches composition and literature as well as the liberal arts capstone, “Humanism, Science and Technology.” She has also taught at Hunter College, and at universities in Croatia and Belgium as a Fulbright Scholar. Her areas of interest are modern American poetry, women’s studies, politics and literature, and essay writing. Her articles have appeared in such publications as American Studies, Legacy, and The Times Higher Education Supplement. She contributed a chapter to the anthology Gender in Modernism (U of Illinois P, 2007) and is the author of Women Poets on the Left (UP of Florida, 2001).

 

LINDA CHANDLER received a B.S.E. from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. She also has a Masters in English from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. She specializes in American Literature before 1800 and Nineteenth Century American Literature. She has presented at numerous conferences and is currently working on her manuscript Keeping Home: Another Look at Domesticity in Antebellum America. She has taught Basic Writing, Composition I, Composition II, The Bible as Literature, Children's Literature, the New Student Seminar and LIB200: Science, Humanism and Technology at LaGuardia.
Schools attended: University of Pennsylvania (B.S.E.); Stanford University (M.A.); University of CA, Berkeley (Ph.D).
Area of Specialization: American Literature before 1800; Nineteenth Century American Literature.
Favorite Quote: "Make better ripples in the world" - Melanie Lewis
 

Dr. Barbara Comins, Professor of English, began her professional life as a cellist playing in the New Jersey Symphony, the New York Pops, the New York Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, and orchestras backing Tony Bennett, Benny Goodman, Henry Mancini, Barry Manilow, Luciano Pavarotti, Doc Severinsen, Frank Sinatra, Ben Vereen, and many others.
Winner of a National Endowment for the Humanities dissertation award, she earned her Ph.D. in English as a fellowship student at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her writing includes pieces in the New York Times, Poetry Calendar, Allegro, the Wallace Stevens Journal, and the Edith Wharton Review. Her essays “‘That Queer Sea’: Elizabeth Bishop and the Sea,” “‘Shuddering Insights’: Elizabeth Bishop and Surprise,” and “‘Then the Theatre…Changed’: Musical Frames for Wallace Stevens” appeared in the anthologies Divisions of the Heart: Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Memory and Place, “In Worcester Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop, and Essays on Transgressive Readings: Reading Over the Lines. With the British composer John Marson, she co-wrote the musical Getaway.
At LaGuardia Community College, she teaches freshman composition; creative writing; literature; the college’s capstone liberal arts seminar “Humanism, Science, and Technology,” and the course she created “Cultural Identity in American Literature.”
 

Carrie Conners was born in Moundsville, West Virginia. She received her BA in English Literature and English Writing from the University of Pittsburgh and her MA and PHD in Literary Studies with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her academic interests include contemporary American poetry, humor theory, politics in literature, and feminist theory. In addition to Composition and Basic Writing, Carrie Conners has taught Creative Writing, Introduction to Poetry, and the Learning Communities cluster, “Hedonism: The Vampire, the Deviant, the Repressed.” She is also a poet and her work has appeared in Tar Wolf Review, DMQ Review, California Quarterly, and RHINO.
 

Schools attended: Vassar College and the University of Michigan (BA); Drew University (Master of Letters); Teachers College of Columbia University (Certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language).
Area of specialization: I have taught American, British, and world literature, journalism, and theater arts. My Masters thesis was part academic and part creative and centered on epistolary novels. A published writer, I have written articles for ELLE Magazine, New Jersey Countryside Magazine, the Vassar Quarterly, and The Asbury Park Press.
I have also worked in corporate sales for Xerox Corporation and AT&T and as a literary agent, a Rights Director at Dell Publishing Co., Inc. and a high school English teacher.

Emaildcorcoran@lagcc.cuny.edu
 

Lois Anne DeLong, an adjunct instructor at LaGuardia since 2007, has taught most of the basic composition courses offered by the Department of English, including ENG/ENA/ENZ 099, ENG/ENC 101, ENG102, and ENG103. The two basic threads that run through all of her classes is the interrelation between writing and critical thinking, and the idea that literature is best perceived in the context of its time. To achieve the latter, her classes often incorporate articles and research projects aimed at better understanding the social, economic, and political forces that created the world depicted in the text.
Prior to joining the LaGuardia faculty, Lois spent 25 years as a professional writer and editor in the nonprofit sector, handling a variety of assignments in technical publishing, public relations, and marketing. Most of those years were spent at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, where she served as managing editor of two quarterly magazines, publications marketing manager, and senior communications consultant. In 2004, she launched her own editorial freelance business, Better World Ink. She is a regular contributor to an engineering journal, Environmental Progress and Sustainable Development, writing about news and research trends affecting environmental engineers working in the chemical process and energy sectors. Other freelance clients have included ENACT, Inc., a nonprofit drama-in-education organization, and the Grand Street Settlement.
Theatre is another dominant influence on Lois’ life and teaching style. A founding member of the Presbytery of Long Island El Salvador Partnership, she serves as project director for the group’s Youth Theatre Workshop, an annual program that brings together young people from Long Island and El Salvador for a week of theatre exercises, improvisations, and the development and performance of an original bilingual play. Lois is also director of GSG (Godsongs Group) Productions, a youth and young adult theatre group based in Brentwood, NY, that produces original plays. To date, she has penned ten full-length plays for this group, and several shorter presentations for the Youth Theatre Workshop. In 2004, Pioneer Drama Services published one of her plays, a topical one-act called "Touchy Subjects" that deals with sexual harassment in schools. She is also co-author of No Manger too Small, a collection of short Christmas plays for children, published by CSS Publications in the fall of 2006.
Schools Attended: New York University (B.A.-Journalism and Dramatic Literature; M.A.-Theatre in Education)
Literature I like to teach: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Things they Carried by Tim O’Brien, The Piano Lesson by August Wilson, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, 14 by Jose Casas, The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman, King Lear by William Shakespeare, and the oral histories of Crossing the Boulevard. In future classes, we will be studying Othello by Shakespeare, Antigone by Sophocles, and Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow.
 

Richard Dragan currently teaches Basic Writing, Composition I and II. In Spring 2007, he taught American Literature II, a survey of American Literature since 1865. Previous to LaGuardia, he taught a two-semester sequence on Great Works (with a World Literature focus) at Baruch College for several years. While in graduate school, he worked extensively in business and technical journalism publishing hundreds of articles for national magazines and websites. His work has been translated into 11 languages in print and online. Additionally, he has taught web design and computer technology at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education for over a decade.
He is busy revising his dissertation on the use of recent science for aesthetic effects in the encyclopedic novels of James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Richard Powers. He is collaborating on a cognitive science cluster for 2009 that will bridge 'the two cultures' of science and the humanities. He is circulating a manuscript of short stories, Words for a Mood, and is working on a new novel.
An avid amateur classical and jazz guitarist, he continues to arrange music, especially jazz standards and the music of J. S. Bach.
Schools Attended: Oberlin College (B.A. in English and Minor in History), Columbia University (M.A. in English and Comparative Literature, MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction), The Graduate Center / CUNY (Ph.D. in English). Areas of Specialization: 20th/21st Century British and American Literature, Modernism and Postmodernism, Science and Literature, James Joyce, Anglophone Literature, Creative Writing—Fiction, Journalism. A Favorite Quote: "What two temperaments did they individually represent? The scientific. The artistic." --James Joyce, "Ithaca," Ulysses (1922).
Authors I Have Taught At LaGuardia: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Mina Loy, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, John Updike, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, Alice Walker, Ha Jin, Amy Tan, John Ashbery, Alice Munro, Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Wright, Derek Walcott.
Recent and Upcoming Conference Papers:

• "Falling Men: Realistic and Postmodern Terror and Wonder in DeLillo and McEwan's Recent Fiction and James Marsh's Man on Wire." Don DeLillo in the Twenty-First Century Conference, Don DeLillo Society, Louisville, KY, February 2009.
• "Close Reading Matters: Explicating American Literature by Urban Community College Students." Close Reading Conference, NYCEA, St. Bonaventure University, Buffalo, NY, October 2008.
• "Darwin on the Balloon: Reading Evolutionary Science in Ian McEwan's Enduring Love." Revolution and Literature / Evolution and Literature Conference, NYCEA, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, April 2007.
• "Leaving the Bronx: Don DeLillo's Modern and Postmodern Cities in His Early Fiction." Literature and the City Conference, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, March 2006.
• "Mind-Body Problems: Science and Triangulating Desire in the Work of Richard Powers and Jeanette Winterson. " Locating Love Conference, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, March 2004.

Contributing Editor: PC Magazine
 

Professor Thomas (Tom) Fink--member of LaGuardia's English Department since 1981--regularly teaches ENG 101, 102, and 270 (Introduction to Poetry). Professor Fink is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Joyride (Marsh Hawk Press, 2013) and Autopsy Turvy, coauthored with Maya Diablo Mason (Meritage Press, 2010). He has also published an e-chapbook (Beard of Bees, 2006), a collaborative e-chap book with Tom Beckett (Beard of Bees, 2014), and two chapbooks (from Truck Books and Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs) that appeared in 2009. His poem, "Yinglish Strophes IX," originally published in Barrow Street, was chosen by Heather McHugh and David Lehman for The Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribner's). Fink's books of criticism include "A Different Sense of Power": Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth Century U.S. Poetry (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickison University Press, 2001) and The Poetry of David Shapiro (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1993). Fink is the co-editor of two critical anthologies: Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary Innovative American Poetry (U of Alabama P, 2014) and Burning Interiors: David Shapiro's Poetry and Poetics (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2007). He is also co-editor of Literature Around the Globe (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1994). Professor Fink has published over 200 reviews, interviews, and articles in numerous journals, including Contemporary Literature, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Exchange Values, Jacket (and Jacket 2), Minnesota Review, Slope, Talisman, Twentieth Century Literature, and Verse.Fink's paintings hang in various collections. For further information, please see www.thomasfinkpoetry.net and/or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Fink_(poet) ‎ Schools Attended: Princeton University (B.A.) and Columbia University (M.A., Ph.D.)Area of Specialization: Contemporary U.S. Poetry
 

Kristen Gallagher was born and raised in Philadelphia, PA. She received her B.A. from University of Pennsylvania in 1991 with a major in Biological Basis of Behavior and worked with Dr. Ed Pugh researching color vision. After working in vision science at University of California-Davis for two years, Professor Gallagher realized she preferred to be a poet. She then returned to Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania College of General Studies where she studied Modern and Contemporary American Poetry with Alan Filreis, Bob Perelman, and Jean-Michel Rabaté. In 1995, she was a founding member of The Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2005, she received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program. From 2000-2005, she was the editor of both Rust Talks, a Buffalo-area reading and discussion series and newsletter for poetry, and Handwritten Press (poetry chapbooks). She currently co-edits WIG Journal of the Arts with Tim Shaner, and Truck Books (poetry) with Christopher Alexander. Her first poetry book We Are Here came out in 2010. At LaGuardia, she serves as the Chair of the Creative Writing Committee, co-directs the Faculty Seminar “Teaching the City” with Dr. Karen Miller from Social Science, and leads the series “Collective Translation,” an ongoing project where students, faculty, and staff from the college work in collectives to translate modern American poems into as many languages as possible. In addition to ENG 099: Basic Writing, she teaches ENN 198: Creative Writing Urban Studies, Liberal Arts 200: Haunted Media, ENG 270: Introduction to Poetry, ENG 271 Creative Writing Poetry, ENG 220: The Seminar in Teaching Writing, and ENG 102: Introduction to Literature.Poetry Chapbooks:

• Poems Got Watching the News, with Christopher Alexander, New York: Cheap Art (2008).
• Our National Catastrophe, with Christopher Alexander, New York: Cheap Art (2007)
• No Goal, Chicago: Rubba Ducky (2006).

Articles:

• "Affective Labor: Teaching Writing in the New Economy," with Christopher Alexander, In Transit 3 (October 2008).
• "Some Limits of Ratio; or, Aesthetic Has No Goal," Crayon 5 (September 2008).
• "Neoliberal Poetry," with Christopher Alexander and Matthias Regan, Crayon 5 (September 2008).
• "Pairing Freire: Teaching 'The Banking Concept of Education' with the History of Open Admissions at CUNY," Journal of the Paulo Freire Institute Online, Winter 2007, Vol. 2. Issue 2. http://web.gseis.ucla.edu/~pfi/Journal_PFI/ 
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• "Book As World: A Brief History of handwritten press" HOW2 (poetry and poetics), Special Issue: Small Press Forum (2006).

Interviews:

• "Conversation with Kristen Gallagher," CA Conrad, Philly Sound (September 2008).
• "A Conversation with Harryette Mullen,"Kristen Gallagher, Farah Griffin and Michael Magee, Combo 1:1 (1998).
• Poetry Inclusions in Magazines and Journals
• Featured Poet, Primary Writing (January 2006).
• Poems have appeared in Model Homes (November 2008); LaGuardia Women's Studies Newsletter (Spring 2008); Ecopoetics 4 (2007); Combo 16 (2006); Chain Arts 15 (2005); Mirage 4 Periodical (October 2005); Antennae 8 (May 2004); Combo 14 (May 2004); Art Voice (30, October 2003); Combo 12 (2003); Mirage 4 Periodical (April 2003); kenning 12 (2002); Kiosk 1 (2002); Boog City (2001); Combo 8 (2001); Combo 4 (1999); Ixnay 3 (1998); American Poetry Review 46 (3), (1998); Combo 1 (1998).

Editor:

• WIG: Writing at Work, periodical, 2004-present. handwritten press (poetry chapbooks), bi-annual, 1999-present. http://handwritten.org 
• Rust Talks Newsletter (poetry and correspondence), bi-monthly, 1999-2004.
• The Form of Our Uncertainty: a Tribute to Gil Ott (festschrift), Chax Press, 2000.

 

Originally from Chile, Dr. Ximena Gallardo C. is a gender and film scholar who has published and presented widely on issues of representation in popular culture. She is currently working on a comprehensive study of women and gender in science fiction cinema entitled She Came from Outer Space. Dr. Gallardo is also Feminism editor for Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, and the co-chair for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Area for the Southwest and Texas Popular Culture/American Culture Association. Her first book, Alien Woman (Continuum, 2004), a study of the representation of women and gender in the Alien film series, was co-authored with C. Jason Smith.Schools Attended: Louisiana State University.
Area of Specialization: British literature, Gender Theory and Film Theory, Ethnic Literatures, and Composition.
Favorite Quote: "If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." -- Catherine Aird
Authors I teach: Whenever I teach essays, novels, and short stories, I usually choose at least one article or essay by Barbara Ehrenreich, Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café or Mama Day, and at least one work by Octavia Butler: “Bloodchild,” Dawn, or Wild Seed. When I teach drama, I always include at least one play by William Shakespeare (my usual choices are Othello, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and King Lear), and several selections from the following: Los Vendidos by Luis Valdez, Dutchman by Imamu Amiri Baraka, Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith, Jeffrey by Paul Rudnick, Betrayal by Harold Pinter, Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman, M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, and The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. My choices for poetry vary enormously, but I tend to fall back on one or more of these poets: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Plath, Angelou, Piercy.Books: Alien Woman: The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley. Co-author. New York: Continuum, 2004. Winner of the 2005 Ray and Pat Browne Popular Culture Association Book Award.Articles:

• "Happily Ever After: Harry Potter and the Quest for the Domestic." Co-author. Reading Harry Potter Again: New Critical Essays. Ed. Giselle Liza Anatole. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009.
• "The Alien Film Series." Co-author. Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Vol. II. Ed. Robin Reid. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008: 3-5.
• "Feminism." An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett. Ed. Andrew M. Butler. Oxford: Greenwood, 2007. 149-152.
• "Sexism." An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett. Ed. Andrew M. Butler. Oxford: Greenwood, 2007. 331-333.
• "Alien: The History of Xenosex." Den of Geek. Dec. 19 2007.
• "Oy Science Fiction: On Genre, Criticism, and Alien Love: An Interview with Marleen S. Barr." Co-author. Fem-scape, a special edition of Reconstruction. 5.4 (Winter 2005). n.p. 5 pp.
• "How the Online Classroom Changed the Way I Teach." In Transit: The LaGuardia Journal on Teaching and Learning 1.1 (Fall 2005): 23-27.
• "'Who Are You?': Alien/Woman as Post-human Subject in Alien Resurrection." Post.human.ous, a special edition of Reconstruction: An Interdisciplinary Research Community 4.3 (Summer 2004). n.p. 13 pp.
• "Cinderfella: J. K. Rowling's Wily Web of Gender." Co-author. Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays. Ed. Giselle Liza Anatole. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. 191-205.

Editions:

• Fem-scape, a special edition of Reconstruction: An Interdisciplinary Research Community 5.4 (Winter 2005).
• Post.human.ous, a special edition of Reconstruction. Co-editor. Reconstruction: An Interdisciplinary Research Community 4.3 (Summer 2004).

Websites: LaGuardia Community College's 2007-2008 Common Reading Companion Website to An Inconvenient Truth. Content manager. LaGuardia Community College. 2007-2008.
 

Gail has been a full-time member of the English Department since 1986. In her early years at LaGuardia she was a full-time teacher and a full-time student. Thanks to an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship, she was able to complete her Ph.D. in English at CUNY Graduate Center. She feels tremendous admiration for LaGuardia's "juggling" students.
Gail teaches a wide variety of courses at LaGuardia including Basic Writing, Composition I, Writing through Literature and The Novel in the college's Honors program. She has been a member of many LaGuardia Learning Community faculty teams. In 1998, LaGuardia's Chapter of Phi Theta Kappa, the national honor society, granted her honorary membership to acknowledge her excellence as a teacher. In 2003 she was named a Semi-Finalist for the David R. Pierce Faculty Technology Award from the American Association of Community Colleges.
With Bret Eynon, she launched In Transit: The LaGuardia Journal on Teaching and Learning. The first issue was published in Fall 2005. She continues to serve as Editor of the college's journal.
Schools Attended: George Washington University (B.A.); SUNY at Oneonta (M.A.); Graduate School and University Center, CUNY (Ph.D.)
Favorite Quote: "It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it." from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

 

Stafford Grégoire earned his Baccalaureate at Hunter College (1992) and his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley (May 2004). His specialization is in Nineteenth Century African American and American Literature. He is revising his dissertation, Blacks Seeing Seeing Blacks: Surveillance and The Gaze in the Works of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and William Wells Brown for publication. This work explores the nexus between Foucault’s theory of surveillance and Lacan’s refinement of the theories of the Gaze. He is interested in the depiction of the visual forces of the “look,” “the gaze,” or surveillance, which reify the status of African Americans as diminished beings. Currently he is an Assistant Professor at LaGuardia Community College CUNY and working on a newer, though still related field, Hip-Hop Fiction or contemporary African American crime novels. He has recently presented two papers on the subject in New Mexico and The Bronx. “Hip-Hop Scribes: Uncomfortable Truths in Black on White” examined the creation of a new genre of African American or Black Literature outside of the confines of mainstream publishing. “Hip-Hop Scribes: Double-Consciousness Double-Crossed” examines how this new genre is, because of its unique genesis, able to transgress the DuBoisian paradigm of “self-consciousness” in African American Belle Lettres. Previous Academic Honors:

• Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award (1998-1999)
• Summer Mellon Fellowship (1995)
• Graduate Opportunity Fellowship (1992-1994)
• Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship (1990-1992)