Tuesday, April 23, 2019, at 6 p.m., 4th Floor Program Room

Melissa Girard is an Associate Professor of English at Loyola University Maryland. She teaches courses in American literature, modern poetry, and gender and sexuality studies. Her research focuses on the history of twentieth-century American women's poetry. Recent publications include "J. Saunders Redding and the 'Surrender' of African American Women's Poetry" (PMLA, 2017) and "Forgiving the Sonnet: Modernist Women's Love Poetry and the Problem of Sentimentality" (Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry, 2016).

Allen Brizee is an Associate Professor of Writing at Loyola University Maryland. He teaches technical and professional writing, as well as rhetoric and first-year writing. Dr. Brizee’s research focuses on social justice projects he runs with students, faculty members, and members of the Baltimore community. His most recent project joined service-learning students with GEDCO/CARES on York Road to run literacy and employment workshops at the Loyola Clinical Centers in Belvedere Square. 

Allen received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in rhetoric and composition, and he has been published in numerous journals in writing studies. In 2016, he published the co-authored the book Partners in Literacy: A Writing Center Model for Civic Engagement (Rowman and Littlefield). In 2018, he co-authored Read, Reason, Write: An Argument Text and Reader, 12th ed. (McGraw-Hill Education). Allen lives in Towson, Maryland with his wife, Stephanie, and their two (crazy) West Highland Terriers, Jackson and Josephine.