Writing Center | Consultants

When you come to the Writing Center, you will work with one of our writing consultants – we're students too, so we're well-versed in writer's block! We've put together some of our favorite reads to get your creativity flowing.

Natalia Allende is from Santiago, Chile. She studied primary school teaching, and is now a second-year MA student. She loves the characters of Henry James, and finds Gabriel García-Márquez fascinating.

Lizz Callaghan is a Junior in the Department of Literature from Connecticut. Her biggest struggle is her extreme aversion to proof-reading. Favorite authors include Jane Austen, J.K. Rowling, Ray Bradbury, Douglas Adams, and many others.

Kelsey Charles is a third-year MFA student from North East, Maryland. His concentration is fiction, but he spends nearly as much time working with poetry. 

Amelia Cohen-Levy is a third-year MFA in Poetry who did not read anything this summer that wasn't a street sign, billboard, menu, magazine, or Web site.

Taryn McKinnon is from the Jersey Shore, and is a senior with a Literature major and a Communications minor. The best book she read this summer was Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.

Benjamin Malcolm is a third-year MFA student. He was born outside of Boston, MA, and lived in Thailand. He loves to read everything from graphic novels to classic fiction, but is especially interested in interculturally-focused work.

Meghan Nesmith is a second-year MFA student from Canada with a patriotic softness for authors from her native land – Timothy Findley and Alistair MacLeod, for now. 

Rose O'Malley has spent the last seven years in Washington, but will always be a Jersey girl at heart. She is a first-year MA student who has a guilty fondness for comic books.

Minju Park is a third-year Kogod student from Virginia. One of her hobbies is adopting abandoned books. Her literature heroes are Pat Conroy and Katharine Kerr with their works such as Prince of Tides and Daggerspell.

Maeg Keane hails from an obscure corner of Mass., but tells everyone she's from Boston. She is a senior Literature major and Multi-Ethnic Studies minor. If you ask for her favorite book, she'll usually give you the name of the last one she read: recently, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life.

Lenny Rutland is a second-year MA student from St. Augustine, FL. While his research interests focus mainly upon 20th-century American literature, recent favorites include Laurence Sterne, Virginia Woolfe, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, Salman Rushdie, and Roberto Bolaño.

Rochelle King is a second-year MA student in the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) program from Arizona via Utah. She loves prewriting activities, but these tend to make her writing a little wordy so she spends lots of time editing her work.

Mary Sweeney is a first-year MA student who spent two years working for Chicago non-profits before deciding to return to school for literature.  She loves poetry as well as the visual arts. 

Amanda White was born in Miami, grew up in Northern Virginia, but spent the past five years in Dallas.  She's a second-year  MA student. Favorite authors include Edith Wharton, Henry James, Dostoevsky, Garcia Marquez, and W.H. Auden. 

Laura Wolz is a senior from Colorado studying journalism and philosophy, meaning she spends a lot of time asking questions. She enjoys little more than good conversation over a cuppa tea and Victorian-era children's literature like Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and Edith Nesbitt.

Jenny Dunnington is a first-year MFA student from Colorado, and believes D.C. traffic will be the main source of angst and turmoil in her poetry this year. She's currently reading the works of Mary Oliver, though Wilfred Owen and Yusef Komunyakaa will always rank among her favorites.

Jenny Molberg is a third-year MFA student from Dallas. Her biggest struggle with writing is remembering the difference between "lay" and "lie." Favorite writers: William Faulkner, James Wright, Naomi Shihab Nye and e.e. cummings.

Melissa Wyse grew up in New Jersey, and has lived in Baltimore for a little over five years. She's a first-year MFA student, and loves reading short stories and fiction by contemporary writers.

Apply for an Internship at the Writing Center

The Writing Center is only as good as its staff of talented Writing Consultants. We train and support our staff and set up a schedule that is right for them. So if you are an AU student with an interest in writing and in helping other people, we have an internship for you!

If you are a rising junior or senior or a grad student here at AU, and you have a solid GPA and  good writing skills, the Writing Center offers you 3 hrs. undergraduate or graduate course credit and a chance to try out a teaching interest.  

After an initial intensive training period, interns work  regularly scheduled  hours each week in the Writing Center, meeting  one-to-one with AU undergraduates to advise them on their writing projects.

Interns also complete a semester-long research project concerning an academic writing  topic of their choice and present the results to Writing Center staff at an end-of-semester gathering.

Simply stop by the Center in Battelle 228 to request more information and an application.