English instructors are regularly asked to share their list of favorite authors, perhaps because the list can be as revealing as any autobiographical statement. Having grown up as a preacher’s kid in the 1970s Bronx, I was immersed in the cadences of the King James Bible and Anglican hymns mixed in with the of rhythm Marvin Gaye and the earliest beats of hip hop. Perhaps this is why I find perfection in James Baldwin. Other writers whom I have grown to love include Nathanael West, Flannery O’Connor, John Donne and, of course, Langston Hughes.
When my students ask why I became an English instructor, I credit my parents whose inability to afford a television meant that I had to learn to read if I wanted to entertain myself. Because the local branch of the public library was an inaccessible twenty blocks away, I was fed on an inappropriate (for my age) diet of books from my parent’s eclectic collection. Representative authors included George Eliot and John Updike as well as Eldridge Cleaver and Ross McDonald. The only titles I did not touch were my father’s books of German theology because I knew that if my mother who was (and still is) brilliant did not understand them, I stood no chance.
Like many undergraduates, once I arrived at college I tried to distance myself from the expected. No, I would not be an English major; instead, I would major in economics. I studied briefly under Vassar College’s most highly paid professor, Stephen Rousseas, so remunerated because of his regular jaunts back and forth to Washington as an advisor to President Reagan. Within a year, however, the glamorous 1980s goal of an MBA gave way to the fact that I could not fathom why anyone would spend time determining the equilibrium interest rate—much less what that term meant.
Accepting the inevitable, I enjoyed the next three years, settling finally on Medieval Literature as my area of specialization because of an inspiring young professor, Dr. Daniel Kempton, who eventually became my undergraduate thesis advisor. (Interestingly, Prof. Kempton is now my colleague here at New Paltz.) My senior thesis was a comparative analysis of the female characters in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval. Once, years later, when asked whether he remembered my thesis, Prof. Kempton replied that I was a much better student in graduate school than I had been as an undergraduate. I believe him.
While earning my MA at SUNY New Paltz, I discovered that I loved teaching. Prof. Jan Schmidt’s Theories of Writing course introduced me to various Composition theorists, and I soon found myself drawn to Mina P. Shaughnessy, whose ground-breaking work with basic writers at CUNY inspired me professionally. As coordinator of the Supplemental Writing Workshop (SWW) Composition Program, I still return regularly to Shaughnessy for nuggets of wisdom and insight. While the field of basic writing scholarship has evolved well beyond such classics as Errors and Expectations, Shaughnessy’s texts remind instructors to stop and listen to their student voices. Sometimes, especially during the busy weeks of midterm and finals, I need the reminder
