Academics at MBC
Faculty
Susan Green
Dr. Susan Blair Green is professor of English in ADP. She is director
of the MBC Charlottesville Regional Center, located at Piedmont Virginia
Community College, and teaches and advises for the ADP program. Her original
field of specialty is English Renaissance drama, and she teaches ADP courses
in Intro to Shakespeare and Tudor Stuart Drama as well as Chaucer and Milton
and the Metaphysicals. She is also interested in literature by women and
teaches Women and the Novel.
Dr. Green and her husband have made a number of trips through the American West since 1996. As a result of this travel, she has studied the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition and has made a number of presentations on the explorers and their journals during the bicentennial years of the Corps of Discovery, 2003-2006. She and her husband spent a week in Window Rock, Arizona, in June 2006 as part of an MBC multicultural course focusing on the Navajo and the Hopi. As an outgrowth of the reading done for that trip, Dr. Green is planning a sabbatical to continue her reading in literature by and about Native Americans and hopes to generate a new course for ADP in Native American literature.
Robert Grotjohn
Robert Grotjohn, professor of English, earned the PhD and MA at the University
of Wisconsin at Madison, and the BA at the University of Minnesota at Morris.
He teaches classes in composition, poetry, fiction, and American literature.
His particular research interests include poetry and multi-ethnic literature.
He has presented papers and published critical essays and reviews on poets
such as Langston Hughes, Rita Dove, Harryette Mullen, Lawson Fusao Inada,
Kimiko Hahn, Walter Lew, Mitsuye Yamada, Arthur Sze, Lyn Hejinian, and Gertrude
Stein. At MBC, he has developed multicultural literature offerings with courses
such as Asian American Women Writers, African-American Literature, African
Novels, and Novels of Miscegenation. He believes that a comfortable pair
of running shoes is the perfect complement to any outfit, and, if he had
a motto, it would be “I think I like a speckled ax best” (see
Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography).
Sarah Kennedy
Sarah Kennedy holds an MFA from Vermont College and a PhD from Purdue University.
She is the author of four books of poems, including Consider the Lilies (David
Robert Books 2004), Double Exposure (Cleveland State University
Press Open Competition Winner 2003), and Flow Blue (Elixir Press
Prize in Poetry Winner 2002). Sarah Kennedy has received grants from the
National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and
the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a contributing editor for Shenandoah and West
Branch.
Molly Petty
Molly Petty directs the MBC Writing Center and teaches composition, short stories,
literature for children and youth, and contemporary women writers. She has
an abiding interest in coming-of-age fiction, translated works for children,
and folk tales. In addition to teaching class, advising freshmen, working
with students who tutor in the Writing Center, and helping out with Miscellany,
she enjoys reading her students’ fiction and non-fiction for children
and young adults.
Rick Plant
Rick Plant, professor of English, holds degrees from Oklahoma State University
and Washington University, St. Louis. Prof. Plant’s research interests
are in short fiction, modern American fiction, autobiography, and creative
writing. He has published short fiction, personal essays, poems, and reviews
in a variety of national magazines and anthologies. His national writing
awards include an O. Henry Prize for short fiction, a “Novella Breakthrough” award
(with publication by Texas Review Press), and a “Notable Essay” designation
in the Best American Essays anthology. His manuscript story collection The
Misery of Music was a finalist for both the Flannery O’Connor
Award (University of Georgia Press) and the Spokane Prize in Fiction (Eastern
Washington University Press).
Katherine Turner
Dr. Katherine Turner, assistant professor of English, teaches courses in Composition,
and in British Literature. She previously taught at the University of Oxford
in England, where she worked within the university as well for a number of
American JYA programs (Butler, NCSU, Sarah Lawrence, Williams).
Dr Turner holds several degrees (BA, MPhil and PhD) from the University of Oxford. Her main areas of academic interest are the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and she has worked particularly on travel writing, women’s writing, and eighteenth-century poetry. She is interested in the ways in which literary texts intersect with other cultural forms (like the visual arts and journalism) so as to intervene in issues of public controversy such as poverty, women’s education, marriage and divorce, and the slave trade.
Chief publications: The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition, edited volume of essays, with Francis O’Gorman (Ashgate, 2004); British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Ashgate, 2001); Selected Poems: Thomas Gray, Charles Churchill, William Cowper, ed. with notes and introduction (Penguin, 1998), as well as many articles and reviews on eighteenth-century literature.
Dr Turner is married to a historian, Matthew Poteat, who teaches at CVCC Lynchburg, and they have two children.
