Cardinal Directions

Helping Ball State humanities majors pivot from college to career.

Archives: People

  • Author photo of Angela Jackson-Brown

    Angela Jackson-Brown
    January 21, 2022 by

    Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet and playwright who teaches Creative Writing, English and African American Studies at Ball State University in Muncie, IN. She is also a member of the graduate faculty of the School of Creative and Professional Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. She is a graduate of Troy University, Auburn […]

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    Lauren Cross
    January 19, 2022 by

    Lauren Cross’s writing has appeared in Catapult, Hippocampus, Navigating Narratives: A Thematic Reader and elsewhere. Her essay, “How to Preserve a Body,” was a finalist for Fourth Genre’s 2020 Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Contest. She currently serves as the creative nonfiction editor for Sweet Lit, and she teaches at her alma mater, Ball State University. […]

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  • woman with short light brown hair and a pink scarf

    Katy Rank Lev
    January 14, 2022 by

    Katy Rank Lev is a freelance writer, editor, and educator living in Pittsburgh, PA. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh and has over 15 years’ experience in communications, ranging from nonprofit donor relations to feature-style magazine articles in national publications like Parents magazine. She specializes in higher education communications, […]

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  • lady in a dark shirt, brown hair, and big smile

    Jill Christman
    January 13, 2022 by

    Jill Christman is a 2020 NEA Prose Fellow and the author of two memoirs, Darkroom: A Family Exposure (winner of the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction) and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood (Shebooks & Audible.com). Her essays have appeared in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Iron Horse Literary Review, Longreads, and O The Oprah Magazine—and her new collection, If This […]

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  • a man with brown hair and beard in a light blue shirt

    Jim Miller
    January 11, 2022 by

    Jim Miller is a second-year in Ball State University’s MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. His creative work is comprised of short fiction focused on American culture. His other interests include web design and foreign language translation. In the past, he was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to teach English in […]

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  • Katy Didden
    January 6, 2022 by

    Katy Didden is poet with a special interest in the relationship between text and image; the history of the elegy; and poetry and the environment. Her first book, The Glacier’s Wake, won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize from Pleiades Press, and was published in 2013. She is currently working on a manuscript of mixed media erasure […]

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  • Kathryn S. Gardiner
    January 6, 2022 by

    Kathryn S. Gardiner has been teaching at Ball State since 2015. She earned her MFA in Screenwriting at Hollins University and worked for many years at the Herald Times in Bloomington, IN as a special projects coordinator. In the English department, she teaches screenwriting and Compass Creative. As the Assistant Director of Compass, she oversees […]

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  • Paige Waters
    January 5, 2022 by

    Paige Waters has been teaching in the Department of Media (formerly TCOM) since 2010. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Telecommunications and American History, and a Master of Arts in Telecommunications from Ball State University. In 2019, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.

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  • Patrick Collier
    January 5, 2022 by

    Patrick Collier is an Associate Dean in the College of Sciences and Humanities who oversees Compass Advantage, and thus Cardinal Directions. He just published a book,Teaching Literature: A Practical Guide (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). He’s also the author of Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture, 1880-1930s (Edinburgh UP, 2016), Modernism on Fleet […]

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    Silas Hansen
    January 5, 2022 by

    Silas Hansen has been teaching at Ball State since 2014. His essays have appeared in The Normal School, Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Redivider, Slate, and elsewhere. His work earned an AWP Intro Journals Project Award in 2013 and three “Notable Essay” mentions in the Best American Essays series. His research and teaching interests include […]

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