WRITING CENTER STAFF
Maggie Debelius, Writing Center Director
Maggie received her PhD in English from Princeton University. She is the co-author of the book So What Are You Going to Do With That?, a career guide for humanities students. Along with running the Writing Center, Maggie teaches Approaches to Composition and first-year writing courses.
Abbey Dewey, Writing Center Coordinator
Hometown: Hershey, Pennsylvania
Undergraduate Institution: Southern Methodist University
Major: English
Interests: Children’s literature, yoga, painting
Clara Ennist, Writing Center Coordinator
Hometown: Hillsdale, NJ
Undergraduate Institution: Fordham University
Major: English, Political Science
Interests: Ballet, Bikram Yoga, Cooking/Baking, Arabian Nights’ Entertainments
GRADUATE TUTORS
Name: Kate Allen
Program: Master’s Student in English
Hometown: Salisbury, MD
Undergraduate Institution: The College of William and Mary
Major: English
Interests: Drama, Music, Pedagogy, Children’s Literature, Ballet
Name: Meghan Brinson
Program: Master’s Student in English
Hometown: Charleston, SC
Undergraduate Institution: College of Charleston
Graduate Institution: MFA from Arizona State University, Poetry
Interests: contemporary American women’s poetry, ekphrasis, creative writing
Name: Mallory Findlay
Program: MA in English and American Literature
Hometown: Atlanta, Georgia
Undergrad Institution: Emory University
Major: English
Interests: Southern literature, trauma theory, dogs, music, film, cooking, college football–in no particular order, of course.
Name: Jane Funk
Program: MA in English
Undergrad Institution: Brigham Young University
Major: Comparative Literature; Italian minor
Interests: watching British television, going for long walks, and visiting museums in D.C.
Name: Emma Graner
Program: MA in English
Hometown: Indianapolis, Indiana
Undergrad Institution: Carleton College (Northfield, Minnesota)
Major: Political Science
Graduate Institution: JD, Harvard Law School
Interests: Pedagogy, Early Modern Literature, 18th Century Literature, lindy hop, baked goods
Name: Eurae Muhn Primosch
Undergraduate Institution: Georgetown University
Hometown: Gaithersburg, MD
Major: English
Interests:pedagogy, working with at-risk students, Dickens, Romanticism, baking, eating, Georgetown basketball
Name: Maria Spiegel
Program: MA in English
Hometown: Washington, Pennsylvania
Undergraduate Institution: Yale University
Major: English
Interests:contemporary fiction, Victorian novels, pedagogy, hot tea and brownies
UNDERGRADUATE TUTORS
Name: Andrew Morrison
Hometown: Summit, NJ
Year: 2015
Major: Undecided
Interests: Film, listening to music, creative writing, and reading
Favorite Quote about Writing:
“The first draft of anything is shit” –Ernest Hemingway
Name: Amelia Hall
Hometown: Natchitoches, LA
Year: College, 2013
Majors: English and Theology
Interests: Mythology, Theology, Visual Art, Music, Folklore, Martin Luther, and the OED.
Favorite Quote About Writing: “I revel in the prospect of being able to torture a phrase once more.”–S.J. Perelman
Name: Colleen Scanlon
Hometown: North Attleboro, Massachusetts
Year: 2015
Major: Undecided, Spanish Minor
Interests: Snowboarding, Tennis, Travel
Favorite Quote About Writing:
“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”–E.M. Forster
Name: Erin Desimone
Year: 2015
Hometown: Toronto, Ontario
Major: English, Art History Minor
Interests: Georgetown Sports, family, friends, the beach
Favorite Quote About Writing:
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” – Mark Twain
Name: Bo Julie Crowley
Hometown: Wellesley, MA
Year: 2015
Major: Government
Interests: Running, French, guitar, food
Favorite Quote About Writing:
“It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word” – President Andrew Jackson
Name: Jillian Conrad
Hometown: Saint Louis, MO
Year: Senior
Major: English
Interests: Medieval literature, fashion magazines, yoga, frozen yogurt
Favorite Quote about Writing:
“”Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing” – Benjamin Franklin
Name: Lauren D’Souza
Hometown: Columbus, Ohio
Year: 2013
Major: Double-Major in English and Studio Art; Minor in Theatre & Performance Studies
Interests: reading, writing, painting, running
Favorite Quote About Writing: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you” -Ray Bradbury
Name: Emily Jones
Hometown: Harvard, MA
Year: 2013
Major: English and Psychology
Interests: language, long runs, daydreaming, good food, small bookstores, social and affective neuroscience
Favorite Quote About Writing:
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” -Joan Didion
Name: Jordan Moeny
Hometown: Grants Pass, OR
Year: 2015
Major: Culture and Politics
Interests: Reading and writing, cooking and baking, weird sciencey things and weird not-sciencey things, making up words
Favorite Quote about Writing:”I just say, ‘You know what, just keep writing, and something eventually will work’ It’s important to give yourself permission to stuck sometimes, when you’re writing. But also when you’re doing anything else.”-John Green
Name: Audrey Walker
Hometown: Manhattan, KS
Year: COL 2013
Major: English
Interests: Coffee, French, Improvisational Theatre and more coffee.
Favorite Quote about Writing: “What I find most encouraging about the writing trades: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.” — Kurt Vonnegut
Name: Jessica Natinsky
Hometown:Chicago, IL
Year: 2015
Major: Government/Chinese
Interests: travel, good food, running, and fashion
Favorite Quote about Writing: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” – Oscar Wilde
Name: Jessa Stevens
Hometown: Hopewell, NJ
Year: 2014 (College)
Major: English & history
Minor: Theology
Interests: Soccer, reading, all things Harry Potter, baking, the holiday season, anything pumpkin, granola, writing letters, jazz.
Favorite Quote about Writing: “Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”
-William Faulkner
Name:Kaley Beins
Hometown: Rockville, MD
Year:2014
Major: Environmental Biology
Minor: Spanish
Interests: Writing parodies of popular songs; making Halloween costumes (which I’ve done every year since I was four); cooking (but not cleaning up afterwards); singing (especially to my shower head); exploring (the Georgetown tunnels)
Favorite Quote about Writing: “Write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Ben Franklin
Name: Catherine Farr
Hometown: Warrenton, Virginia
Year: 2013
Majors: English & Art History
Interests: Tennis, Victorian literature, watercolor painting, jewelry making
Favorite Quote About Writing: “The true thoughts that go on inside us are just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of, at most, one tiny little part of us at any given instant.” – David Foster Wallace
Name:Charlotte Kelly
Hometown: Devon, PA
Year: 2014
Major: English, with minors in Journalism and Business Administration
Interests: Running, reading, journalism, friends and family
Favorite Quote About Writing: “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” -Saul Bellow
Name:Joanie Greve
Name: Emily Coccia
Hometown: Paoli, PA (near Philadelphia)
Year: 2015
Major: English and Government
Interests: Georgetown Yearbook, Philodemic Society, reading, writing, politics, field hockey, vegetarian cooking
Favorite Quote About Writing:”That is part of the beauty of literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
Name:Robert Azeem Jackson III
Hometown: Purcellville,VA
Year: 2014
Major: CULP
Interest: cooking, personal fitness, people watching
Before I write I let my mind go blind and and let the lord do his thing. -Tupac Shakur
Name: Bernadette White
Hometown: Scottsdale, AZ
Year: 2013
Major: Human Science
Interests: Mexican food, traveling, dancing instead of walking, music, traveling, art museums, nerdy pick-up lines, Spanish, baking cupcakes, Ballet Folklórico
Favorite quote about writing: “Easy reading is damn hard writing”-Faulkner
Name: Grace Wallack
Hometown: Chapel Hill, NC
Year: Senior
Majors: American Studies, Economics
Interests: Americana, cooking things from scratch, science fiction and drinking lots of coffee.
Favorite Quote About Writing: I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. — David Foster Wallace
Name: Diandre Sheridan
Hometown: Lanham, MD
Year: 2015
Majors: Finance and International Business
Minor: Government
Interests: Photography, music, foreign cultures, football, fashion
Favorite Quote About Writing: “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those who move easiest have learned to dance.” – Alexander Pope
Name: Gabrielle Amoils
Hometown: Los Angeles, California
Year: COL ’15, sophomore
Major:English
Interests: Reading, writing, traveling, graphic design, art, working with children
Favorite Quote About Writing:”At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write. What she wanted was to be lost to the unfolding of an irresistible idea, to see the black thread spooling out from the end of her scratchy silver nib and coiling into words.”- Briony Tallis, from Ian McEwan’s Atonement
Name:Alexandra Ma
Hometown: Hong Kong
Year: 2015
Majors: International History
Interests: Traveling, good music and useless trivia; speaks Chinese and French
Favorite quote about writing: “Words are like leaves; and when they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.” – Alexander Pope
Name: Mairead Reilly
Hometown: Boston, MA
Year: 2013
Majors: Arabic, English minor
Interests: cooking, the Red Sox, rock climbing
Favorite Quote About Writing: “When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.” — John Kennedy Toole, “A Confederacy of Dunces”