• Assignments
• Publications
• Faculty

Faculty

Cindy Anderson

Cindy Anderson holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Cornell University and an M.S. in Journalism from Boston University. She is a widely published journalist, fiction writer and essayist whose work has twice been cited as notable in The Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin 2002 and 2003). Winner of the 2004 New Millennium Fiction Award, the 2003 Crazyhorse Prize, and the 2002 Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction, she also has received two recent Pushcart Prize nominations. One of her stories is forthcoming in Flash Fiction (W.W. Norton & Co.), and a collection, River Talk, will be complete in 2006.

Anderson has held a variety of positions in the College of Communication since 1991. Currently, she serves as faculty editor of the Comment magazine and teaches 201: "My writing informs my teaching, and my teaching informs my writing. I love them both."

Email: cbawrite3@yahoo.com

Susan Blau

Susan Blau directs the Writing Program and The COM Writing Center. She is also co-author of Writing in the Works, the textbook used in 201 and in college writing programs around the country. She has published scholarly articles on her research in writing center theory, composition theory, and literature. And, she likes talking to students.

Email: blaucom@bu.edu
Phone: x3150
Office Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 10-11 or by appointment.

Kate Burak

I started teaching CO201 when the course was created, in 1990. It was kind of like the Gilligan's Island boat ride, "a three hour tour," that turned into a much longer gig. I had to learn a lot to teach all the different formats in 201. I became so enthusiastic about the way students improve their writing, and enjoy the process, I decided I wanted to write a book about it. A group of teachers agreed and we all set out to write a textbook based on our course. After many rejections, and all sorts of developments in our personal lives, only two writers were left on the project, me and Susan Blau. After seven years of trying (Susan says it was fewer, but I know better), we sold our proposal to Houghton Mifflin and now Writing in the Works is the text for CO201, and we hope, for many other writing courses all over the country.

That publishing story is pretty typical for me. I sent out my first short story 32 times. I still have the record of my rejections. I sent one version to Fiction magazine because I knew a writer I admired, Jayne Anne Phillips published there. My first rejection from Fiction (there were three), came with a note. To me this was nothing but encouragement: Some human had actually read my story and was writing me about it! Fiction did eventually publish the story, and it was a much better story than the original, pre-rejection version. A few of my other stories were taken on a first try. My point is to show you the process of writing and finding an audience sometimes seems like a wild ride. I always tell my students to take rejection seriously. It means you have to work harder. It doesn't mean you give up.

Email: kburak@bu.edu

Ellen Davis

Ellen Davis did her undergraduate work at Amherst College. She has an M.A.T. from Simmons College, an M.A. from Dartmouth College, and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. Her essays, poems, profiles, and reviews have been published widely, including in such magazines as AGNI, Bostonia, California Quarterly, and The Emily Dickinson Journal. Her work has appeared most recently in The Larcom Review: A Journal of the Arts and Literature of New England and Salamander. She’s been a regular contributor to Harvard Review since 1990. She won the 1998-1999 Sproat Lecturers Award from the English Department at Boston University. She won the COM 201 Teacher of the Year Award in 2005.

Email: edaquili@bu.edu

Gary Duehr

Gary Duehr has written about the arts for newspapers including the Boston Herald and Boston TAB, and for journals including Art on Paper, Frieze and Communication Arts. As a freelancer he has written and designed marketing materials for corporate clients such as Liberty Mutual, Blue Cross and VHB Engineering. In 2001 he received an NEA Poetry Fellowship. His books of poetry are Potato Chips for Dinner (Cobblestone Books, 2004), Beautiful Bullets (Cobblestone Books, 2003), Winter Light (Four Way Books, 1999), and Where Everyone Is Going To (St. Andrews College Press, 1999). Journals in which his poems have appeared include Agni, American Literary Review, Cottonwood, Hawaii Review, Iowa Review, and Southern Poetry Review. In addition, Duehr is a photographer whose work appears internationally in museums and galleries, and he co-directs the Invisible Cities Group, which creates large-scale outdoor events combining performance, visual art, and poetry. Currently is contributing editor of photography for Art New England, and managing editor of the quarterly newsletter Spectrum for Office for the Arts at Harvard. In 2005 his new permanent photo installation “Currents” opened in the North Station of the MBTA.

Email: gduehr@mindspring.com
Phone: 617-628-1021
Office Hours: Tuesday and Thursday 2-3 or by appointment.

Veronica Ellis

A graduate of Boston University (B.A.--English) and Northeastern University Graduate School of Education (M.Ed.), has taught African Culture and English at the American Cooperative School (Liberia--her home country), English courses at the University of Liberia, multicultural children's literature at Wheelock College (Boston), and strategies for a literature-based approach to the language arts at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She worked for ten years as a reading textbook editor with the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin Company. Author of several children's books ("Wynton Marsalis", "Land of the Four Winds", "AFRO-BETS First Book About Africa", "Book of Black Heroes Volume Two: Great Women in the Struggle"--co-author) for the trade market, she continues to write for the educational market, especially 16-page theme books that accompany the reading series of various publishers.

Email: vfellis@msn.com

Leslie Goldberg

In addition to teaching at COM, Leslie Goldberg runs her own communications consulting company, Blue Sun Communications, which she founded in 1991. She specializes in writing and managing a wide range of corporate communications materials, including annual reports, newsletters, Web pages, and corporate capabilities brochures. Clients include McLean Hospital, Tufts University, and the Boston Museum of Science.

Professor Goldberg also teaches communication and media studies courses at Tufts University, as well corporate writing seminars to professionals in the workplace. She is the former Assistant Director of the COM Writing Center. She holds an M.S. in Mass Communications from BU and a B.S. in Psychology from Tufts.

Email: bluesun@bu.edu

John Hall

John Hall is a Preceptor in the 201 Writing Program. In addition to teaching two 201 sections each semester, he is the Associate Director of the COM Writing Center, a position he has held at BU since 1995. He has also taught film studies courses at several Boston schools, including MIT, the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and Massachusetts College of Art. Professor Hall has published film reviews and essays in The Boston Phoenix, The Improper Bostonian, and Bright Lights Film Journal. Along with Professor Susan Blau, the Director of the COM Writing Center, he has published research on writing center issues in The Writing Center Journal and The Writing Lab Newsletter.

Email: johnhall@bu.edu
Phone: 617-353-7298
Office Hours: Monday through Thursday from 2-3 p.m., or by appointment.
Office Location: COM B27D (inside COM Writing Center)

Jeff Mason

BA, University of California, Berkeley;
MFA, University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop.

Mr. Mason has taught in the Boston area and at the University of Iowa. He has published work in The Boston Book Review and elsewhere. His awards include the James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship and the Maytag Fellowship from the Iowa's Writer's Workshop.

Peter Rand

Peter Rand is the author of four books of fiction and one nonfiction work, China Hands, an account of the Chinese revolution and civil war as witnessed by American journalists and writers, published in 1995. He has taught creative writing at Columbia University (1976-1991), Expository Writing at Harvard University (1987-88) and has taught at Boston University since 1989. Rand is also the co-translator and editor of three recent works of Chinese journalistic-political memoir.

Email: InuiRand@aol.com

Richard Ravin

A graduate of Brandeis University, Dick Ravin writes fiction when he isn't producing P.R. material, web content or journalism. He co-wrote and co-produced a PBS/WGBH website which received a WEBBY Award nomination in Education. Dick has published journalism in Salon.com, North Shore Magazine, the San Francisco Examiner among others, and his piece about his writing mentor, Andre Dubus, appeared in Andre Dubus: Tributes (Xavier Review Press.) In a previous life, Dick worked as a Hollywood television executive making movies of the week and miniseries. He has one novel under submission to publishers and is mid-draft on his second.

Email: rmr48@comcast.net

Tinker Ready

Tinker Ready covers health and science for a range of newspapers and magazines. Since 1998, she has written freelance stories for Nature Medicine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Phoenix, Esquire, Parents and Utne. She spent most of the 1990s with The News & Observer, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Prior to that, Ready worked in Washington, D.C., for two years, covering Capitol Hill for the business newspaper, Health Week. She also spent 1996 in Phnom Penh working with the Khmer/English Cambodia Daily. Ready recently earned her MA in journalism at Northeastern University. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and son.

E:mail: tinkerr@bu.edu

Taline Voskeritchian

Taline Voskeritchian, a prose writer and literary translator, has published in The Nation, Agni Review, Daily Star/International Herald Tribune, International Quarterly, among others. Her translations, from Arabic and Armenian, have appeared in London Review of Books, Ararat, and the on-line translation magazine Words Without Borders. She has written art reviews of Boston events for South End News and artsMedia.

Email: taline@bu.edu

Meta Wagner

Meta Wagner teaches CO 201: Introduction to Communication Writing at BU. She also teaches personal essay writing and a seminar on creativity at Emerson College.

Meta is the “Vox Pop” columnist at PopMatters (www.popmatters.com), an international magazine of cultural criticism. The column is a humorous yet pointed take on how our pop culture choices reflect back on us. Her opinion pieces and personal essays have appeared in Salon, Boston Globe Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Christian Science Monitor.

During her years in marketing communications, Meta worked with clients such as Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, The Jimmy Fund, Project Bread, and numerous biotech companies. She received multiple awards from the New England Publicity Club and the Ad Club of Greater Boston.

Meta received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and her BA from Brown University.

Email: metaw@bu.edu

Phyllis Waldman

Phyllis Waldman holds degrees from Emerson College, where she was also an Assistant Professor of Communications for five years. Prior to teaching, her career in the entertainment industry spanned both coasts: She started out as a Promotions Writer for Metromedia Television in Los Angeles and, working her way back East, became a consultant for ABC Daytime Television in New York.

In between those stints, Ms. Waldman was an award-winning copywriter, Creative Director, corporate Vice President for Advertising, and mom) to her now college-age daughter, Emma. A contributing writer to Wedding Style, Food & Wine, The Providence Journal, and The Boston Globe, Ms. Waldman is also a “budding” screenwriter, whose work has been picked up (and put down) by Columbia Pictures (and her agent) about a dozen times.

Email: pwaldman@bu.edu

Boston University College of Communication
640 Commonwealth Avenue | Boston, MA 02215
Phone: 617-353-3450

• Copyright
• Report a site error