Profiles

Steve Sherwood, Ph.D., Director

Steve Sherwood, director of the William L. Adams Center for Writing, has been a writing specialist with the Center and an instructor for the TCU English Department since 1988, teaching a variety of creative writing and composition courses. Before assuming the directorship in July 2002, he served the Center as interim director, associate director, and coordinator of peer tutor training. Sherwood received a bachelor degree in journalism from the University of Colorado in 1977, a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Montana in 1987, and in 2004, a doctorate in rhetoric and composition from TCU. He has presented papers at CCCCs, NCTE, the International Writing Centers Association Conference, the National Conference for Peer Tutors in Writing, and a number of other national and regional conferences. His publications include essays in Writing Center Journal, Dialogue, Journal of Teaching Writing, Rendezvous, English in Texas, Weber Studies, Writing Lab Newsletter, Wiring the Writing Center, Writing Center Perspectives, Northern Lights, Outside, and other journals. Sherwood's fiction has appeared in Red Rock Review, Chiron Review, New Texas, RiverSedge, descant, and Amarillo Bay. With Christina Murphy he edited the St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors (1995) and with Murphy and Joe Law he compiled Writing Centers: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press, 1996). The second edition of the St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors appeared in 2003, and the third edition will appear in 2007. In 1997, with Murphy and Law, he received the National Writing Centers Association Award for the Outstanding Book published in 1996 on writing center theory and practice. Sherwood's mystery novel, titled Hardwater, won the 2003 George Garrett Fiction Prize and has recently been published by the Texas Review Press. Recently, Sherwood was elected to a three-year term as an at large representative to the International Writing Center Association Executive Board.

Dave Kuhne, Ph.D., Associate Director

Dave Kuhne holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Arkansas and a Ph.D. in English from Texas Christian University. He has taught composition, creative writing, and literature at the University of Arkansas, Lamar University, Texas Wesleyan University, and Texas Christian University, and he is currently Associate Director of the William L. Adams Center for Writing at TCU. He is also editor of descant, the literary journal of Texas Christian University. Kuhne is the author of African Settings in Contemporary American Novels (Greenwood Press, 1999), and his short fiction has appeared in New Texas and the Concho River Review. His story "The Bridge at Mountainberg" won the Betty Greene Award for Fiction in 1991, and, more recently, his story "Magic Coins" was anthologized in Literary Fort Worth (TCU Press, 2002). He is currently president of the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers.

Cheryl Carithers, M.A., Writing Consultant

Cheryl Carithers earned a B.A. in English and history from Tarleton State University in 1996. Specializing in rhetoric and composition, she received her M.A. in English from Tarleton in 1999. After obtaining her M.A., Ms. Carithers served as the Assistant Director of the University Center for Writing at Dallas Baptist University. She has also taught composition at Howard Payne University and composition and literature at Angelo State University. In addition to teaching, Ms. Carithers has worked as a professional editor. Her research interests include the history of composition, feminist studies in composition and literature as well as writing center and developmental writing center theory. She is currently a Writing Consultant in the William L. Adams Center for Writing and an instructor in the TCU English Department.

Amy Hermanson , Ph.D. Writing Consultant

Amy Hermanson holds a Ph.D. in English (2009) from Texas Christian University, and is a specialist in composition and rhetoric. Her dissertation is titled Acts of Faith: Reading, Rhetoric, and the Creation of Communal Belief in Sixteenth-Century England. She earned her B.A. in English and philosophy at Marquette University in 2002, and she is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Her rhetorical interests include classical, medieval, Renaissance and modern rhetoric and rhetorical criticism. Her interests in literature include the history of the novel, the history of reading, early modern religious literature, Shakespeare, and Milton. She was an assistant to the Radford Chair of Rhetoric at TCU, Professor Richard Leo Enos, from 2006 until 2009. She has published scholarly articles in Rhetoric and Religion; she is the co-editor of The Rhetoric of St. Augustine of Hippo (Baylor, 2008) and Advances in the History of Rhetoric: The First Six Years (Parlor Press 2007).

Marie Laine, M.A., Writing Consultant

Marie Laine received a B.A. in English from Texas Christian University and an M.A. in English from the University of Texas at Arlington and has taught freshman composition at both these institutions. While teaching high school honors English, she edited two student collections of poetry, led Junior Great Books discussions, led workshops in teaching composition and literature, and participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar in literature at Yale University. Ms. Laine is currently a Writing Consultant at the William L. Adams Center for Writing.

Jeanne Rose, M Ed., Writing Consultant

Jeanne Rose, BA Washington University, received her Master of Education degree, emphasizing curriculum development, from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Ms. Rose has developed and implemented curriculum for the teaching of French and Latin in both public and private schools. Her work has been primarily with gifted programs with goals of wider development of English langauge skills to improve reading and articulation in both writing and speaking. While using these innovative programs, Ms. Rose established "The Latin Group," a consortium of St. Louis Latin Teachers. She also created and directed a statewide workshop for Latin and English teachers supported by a grant from The Missouri Committee for the Humanities. Ms. Rose was selected as one of 40 elementary teachers throughout the U.S. as a Virgilian Scholar of The Aeneid Institute supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The outcomes of the five week study program of Roman and Greek Classical Literature were the addition of Roman and Greek Classical Literature to curricula for young people.

Cynthia Shearer, M.A., Writing Consultant

Cynthia Shearer holds an M.A. in English from the University of Mississippi and is the author of two works of fiction, The Wonder Book of the Air (Pantheon /Vintage 1996) and The Celestial Jukebox (Shoemaker &Hoard/Avalon, 2005). Her work has appeared in such publications as Tri-Quarterly, The Missouri Review, The Quarterly, The Oxford American, The Hungry Mind Review (now Ruminator), and Speakeasy. Awards for her short fiction include Honorable Mention in Best American Short Stories, and inclusion in various anthologies such as Beyond O’Connor (University of Georgia Press, 2003) and The Best of the Oxford American. Her first novel won the 1996 prize for fiction from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. She was the recipient of a fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2000. In October of 2005, her Speakeasy essay, based on her six years of experience as the curator of the William Faulkner home Rowan Oak, will appear in the thirtieth anniversary issue of the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Berta McLemore

Berta McLemore is the Office Manager for the William L. Adams Center for Writing. Berta maintains and coordinates schedules, establishes and maintains operational databases, assists in hiring and training 10-12 student consultants each academic year, supervises student workers, and maintains personnel and financial records under the supervision of the director. Berta comes to the Center for Writing from the Intensive English Program, where she was office manager for four years. Prior to the IEP, she was Administrative Assistant to the Associate Dean of the MBA program.

Site last updated on February 11, 2008.