Staff: Writing Assistants Krista Blasch ----------------------------------- Krista is a senior pursuing a degree in Childhood Education. While she loves her education classes, she is also very passionate about her sociology concentration and hopes to use it to promote social changes, especially in the field of public education. She is always excited to help students in The Writing Center discover their own strengths, and she enjoys finding out what topics her peers are writing about. Krista is confident in her organization skills and is good at finding the most concise way to get a strong point across. She loves meeting new people and looks forward to talking through paper ideas and working with students to help them realize their own potential as writers. Lisa Kristel ----------------------------------- Lisa is completing an M.A. in English this year. She took a long and meandering path to arrive here at Post, beginning with a bachelor's degree in computer science and a few years working as a programmer, and including several years as a full-time mother. During that period, she pursued a variety of overlapping freelance careers, including faux-painter and muralist, computer-skills teacher, reading tutor, and graphic artist. She currently volunteers for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's Team in Training, racing in triathlons and fundraising. Back at school after a twenty-year hiatus, she went to The Writing Center for support and advice on her first paper. Impressed by her experience, she soon applied to become a staff member. She enjoys interacting with students who visit The Writing Center, and feels she benefits from the sessions as much as students do, but differently— by learning about students and the subjects they're studying, and by developing as a one-on-one teacher of writing. Daniel Ugenti ----------------------------------- Daniel is a graduate student pursuing a Master’s degree in English. He is a graduate of C.W. Post, with a B.S. in English Education, and he is a certified New York State teacher. Dan is heavily involved in Student Activities at Post: He has served at Orientation and as an Ambassador, as well as received the Post Pride Award, and is currently an RA and an editor of The Pioneer. Dan focuses on excellence as a Writing Assistant, both in face-to-face sessions and online. He enjoys many parts of the writing process, but especially enjoys the gathering of ideas with pre-writing activities. Casmira Boland ----------------------------------- Did you know that minnows have teeth in their throat? Honey never spoils. The opposite sides of a die always add up to seven. Casmira Boland is majoring in Art Education, and she loves the color green, pandas, writing, and drawing. Because she thrives on the challenge of coming up with fresh new ideas, her favorite part of working on papers is brainstorming. These brainstorming sessions are what make her papers, poems, short stories, and art creative. She may not have teeth in her throat, and her left and right sides don't add up to seven, but she's still interesting and loves to help people. Lauren Sassenoff ----------------------------------- Lauren is a graduate student pursuing an M.A. in English. In her spare time, she reads literature, ranging from Charles Dickens to Philippa Gregory. She is especially interested in historical fiction from the time of the Tudor dynasty. Besides reading, Lauren loves classic movies, such as Wuthering Heights and The Country Girl. She is also a big fan of the The Office, and the HBO series Extras. She excels at organizing papers, and once an idea strikes her, a natural fluidity seems to jump from her mind to paper. She has been known to keep Post-Its on her nightstand in case a good idea hits her at 1 o'clock in the morning, and she wants to add it into her paper! Edmond Niemczura III ----------------------------------- Edmond Niemczura III, with enough letters in his name to construct his own alphabet, usually goes by the simpler “Ed.” He is a former Pharmacy major who recently found his calling in English, made the jump, and is now an English major working towards a concentration in Composition and Rhetoric. His prior major allows him to empathize with students who feel more comfortable memorizing the bones in the human hand than writing a paper about them. Having spent time in two drastically different majors allows him dual perspectives, and he enjoys finding new ways of presenting otherwise complex subjects and ideas, and breaking them down into easier-to-manage parts. Things he enjoys other than school: singing in a Misfits cover band (CXXXVIII), and photography. He is not hard to find at The Writing Center: He is usually wearing his trademark hat. Meredith Schieber ----------------------------------- Meredith Schieber is a senior pursuing a degree in History. In addition to her shifts at The Writing Center, she works at the Schwartz Library, in Circulation. In her free time, when she has any, she enjoys reading, watching movies, hanging out with friends, and watching her twin sister perform in Post Theater Company productions. Meredith personally believes that great writers are not born, but rather are developed through extensive practice: All people can become good writers, whether they actually enjoy writing or not. Her strengths in writing include organization, concision, and the ability to pinpoint problems and stay on task. Tinu Awoyomi ----------------------------------- Tinu Awoyomi is a Social Work major in her senior year. After obtaining her B.S in Social Work, she will be attending law school. Tinu enjoys writing for leisure, and she writes extremely fast. She also enjoys writing poems, some of which have been published in school newspapers. She began writing short stories at the age of eight; these stories were not published. One of the stories she wrote at the age of nine was titled "The Big Question." It is interesting to know that Tinu rarely reads fiction; she would rather read textbooks for leisure. In addition, she likes summarizing large materials into condensed, meaningful sentences. Kempton B. Van Hoff ----------------------------------- Kempton has not decided what he would like to be when he grows up. He pretends, sometimes, with the use of vocabulary and the Stop-n-Shop rewards card on his keys, that he is already "a grownup." His friends think he would make a great King of Spain. Youthfulness and possibilities of Iberian leadership notwithstanding, Kempton has taught in various disciplines since age fifteen, and enjoys guiding students through all phases of the writing process. He is currently a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Studies program. Staff: Director Belinda Kremer ----------------------------------- Belinda Kremer directs The Writing Center, coordinates First-Year Writing, and teaches courses in writing and literature in the English Department. She holds an A.B. in Human Biology from Stanford University, and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has hand-produced a number of limited-edition collections, including Blue: Poems for New York (Southside, 2003) and the graphic poem All Begin Guy Walks into a Bar (SugarCity, 2005). Individual poems have appeared in literary journals such as FENCE, Calyx, and Washington Square Journal; poems appear in the current issue of Confrontation. Her chapbooks include “Field(0),” “Chaos & Other Love Songs,” and “Lake Diary,” which is briefly excerpted in a 2007's Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes (Swan, Alison, ed. MSU Press). Among the awards and fellowships she has received are the Rackham Fellowship, the Hopwood Award for Poetry, the Meijer Fellowship in Creative Writing, and a NYSCA Community Arts Regrant. Her current interests in the teaching of writing cluster around rhetorics of “common knowledge" and open-source effects on "common knowledge." "So It Was This Beautiful Night: Infecting the Hybrid," an essay on teaching creative writing, appears in ALT DIS: Alternative Discourse and the Academy, and she is co-editor, with Richard McNabb, and a contributor to, Collide: Styles, Structures and Ideas in Disciplinary Writing (Longman: 2007). CONTACT: belinda.kremer@liu.edu or (516) 299 2732