Letters from Faculty

Dear Prospective Saluki,

My name is Anna Sicari and I have been a professor in Writing Studies (the W in LWDH) for the last three years; although I am still relatively new to SIU, I want to emphasize how much I truly enjoy the environment here and working with the very smart students we have. I love teaching as it allows me to learn from my students and their experiences and passions as it pertains to writing. While the world is rapidly changing, writing is still one of the most essential tools in helping you better understand yourself and the world around you, and still one of the most essential skillsets in shaping your overall success, in college and beyond, as it pertains to your career and community life.

Helping students study, analyze, and experiment with writing in all different forms and genres is what I do! I am a faculty member in the Public and Professional Writing program, which is one of the tracks a potential LWDH/English major can specialize in. Whether you decide to pursue the track in Public and Professional Writing or not, I highly encourage you to take one of the courses we offer in this program with me or one of my wonderful colleagues, Dr. Enrique Paz, Dr. David Johnson, Dr. Corinne Dekkers, and Dr. Josh Daniel, all of whom teach in the program. The Public and Professional Writing program focuses on writing that serves professional goals and/or public interest. In our courses, you will learn how to best meet the needs of your targeted audiences, create a wide variety of professional documents (such as proposals, reports, presentations, websites), learn how to collaborate effectively in different environments (specifically community and workforce environments), gain familiarity with digital tools used for writing, especially as it pertains to large language models and generative AI, and better understand the professional, cultural, and global dynamics of community and professional environments.

One course we offer consistently in this program is ENG 391: Style & Editing, and it has become a popular and successful course in the school. In this class, we explore the rhetorical canon of style, discuss the complexities and issues that come with the topic of academic and professional style specifically, and focus on the practice of editing. No matter what your concentration is, this class will make you a stronger writer! My own particular focus in this class is helping students professionally develop for career pursuits in publishing and editing, as many English majors are interested in that career path, and I have extensive editorial experience in my own academic background. I bring in guest speakers to discuss their careers in editing and publishing--editors from Norton, literary agents who have published authors such as Barack Obama, academic editors who work with Princeton University Press, and people who have worked with Google.

One success story from this course is one of our alumni, Shekinah Reed, an English major, now works with Norton; she attended the Columbia Publishing Institute after taking this course and is now on a successful career path in editing and publishing. If you are interested at all in a career in editing, I strongly recommend taking this class and/or talking with me, as editorial work is something I truly enjoy and have a strong network of colleagues to help support students.

While I love teaching Style & Editing, we offer a diverse group of courses in the Public & Professional Writing program. Other courses that we have offered include: ENG 390: Public and Civic Engaged Writing, ENG 392: Digital & Multimodal Composing, and ENG 489: Professional and Academic Writing Consultation, to name a few. My colleagues Dr. Daniel and Dr. Paz both study generative AI and large language models and are incorporating their research into their writing classes, as many workforces are now mandating employees to be familiar with platforms such as ChatGPT. Dr. Paz is currently teaching ENG 392 and is helping students learn how to collaborate and work with LLMs in their writing projects and pursuits. Dr. Daniel will be teaching this course in the future and will incorporate game design and studies into this course, as that is a research area of his. I have taught ENG 390: Public and Civic Engaged Writing and this course had a strong social justice component, as that is a significant research area of mine: creating equitable and just writing spaces/communities. Currently, Dr. Dekkers and I are collaborating on a Community-Engaged Writing course, in which we will be working with local communities and partnerships in Carbondale and partnering with them to help students develop real-world writing projects that better the communities around them. ENG 489 is a course that focuses on working in the writing center, another potential opportunity that any and every English major should consider, and Dr. Paz is currently the director of the SIU Writing Center.

Another course offering that is popular is ENG 290: Writing Across the Disciplines, which is frequently taught by Dr. David Johnson, and a very helpful course that uses genre analysis to study writing in other fields and disciplines.

As I hope you learned from this letter, the Public & Professional Writing program is dynamic, with a wide-range of courses offered, and wonderful faculty to help support your writing pursuits and career paths. I can’t say enough good things about this program, or the school of Literature, Writing, and Digital Humanities. In all of the English classes offered, you are guaranteed to work with excellent faculty who care about their students, who are passionate about the teaching of language, literature, and writing (both creative and professional), and want their students to become stronger critical thinkers and engaged citizens. We all take your success seriously and there are so many paths for you if you choose to study English: obviously, an academic and teaching path is available, but professional writing contexts, editing and publishing, nonprofit organizations and community work, and law and public policy (and more) also love English majors. I would be happy to talk more about Public & Professional Writing, the school of LWDH, and SIU with you in the near future. Do not hesitate to contact me at any point and all the best to you as you make plans for your next steps! Go DAWGS!

Sincerely,

Dr. Anna Sicari

Dear prospective English major,

I’m so pleased to be one of the first people to welcome you to the SIU Carbondale School of Literature, Writing, and the Digital Humanities. You would be joining a group of students and faculty who are fascinated by all the possibilities of language, who thrill at being swept up in books, in taking them apart to see how they work, in creating our own stories.

As an English major at SIUC, you can specialize in Creative Writing, Literature, Public & Professional Writing, or English Education. I specialize in teaching fiction, so I’m writing to tell you more about the Creative Writing specialization in particular. I’m fairly new, having just started in August of 2025. I chose to come here because of this amazing creative writing program that has a rich history. Many important writers have taught here and graduated from our program, and I hope to help you and many others craft your best stories and find publication. In our program, you’ll find multiple classes in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. These classes are taught by award-winning writers (Judy Jordan, Allison Joseph, Renée Branum, and me). We are all excited to share our time and knowledge with our students to help bolster their careers. In our creative writing courses, you’ll be immersed in a community of writers who will grant you extensive feedback, and you’ll learn advanced writing techniques, professional editing skills, and publishing strategies. Perhaps most importantly, these classes will give your writing an audience who will take every sentence you write as seriously as you do.

You will find your voice as a writer and artist at SIUC. This is the place to challenge and explore your worldview, to test your ideas, to practice compassion and stretch curiosity as you imagine complex human experiences and cultures. You’ll come out of this degree with sharper sentences, a keen editorial eye, and a bevy of rich ideas for your writing. There are also many opportunities to get involved, such as working with our literary journal Grassroots, where you’ll also have the chance to see your work published in its pages. We also have an active reading series that brings exciting authors to campus.

Creative writing culture gave me community when I needed it most, and we hope it will do the same for you. I came to creative writing and college through an untraditional path. I worked construction for a decade in Michigan before trading in my tools for a keyboard. But that working-class experience stayed with me, and to this day I write stories about working people and their fascinating, difficult jobs. I’ve published more than one hundred stories and three books, and most of my pages have been dedicated to illuminating working people’s lives. I bring up my inspiration hoping that you will find a similar artistic drive, that you will give voice to stories deeply in need of telling. One of my favorite writers, Toni Morrison, once said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” So, what’s the missing book you’ve always wanted to read? Let us help you write it.

Again, thank you for considering joining our community. We are deeply honored, and I am excited to read your work.

Thanks,

Dr. Dustin M. Hoffman

Dear prospective English major,

I’m happy to hear of your interest in SIU and the English program. I’ve been an SIU faculty member in English since 2005. I truly enjoy my time in the classroom, and I believe that learning about literature is one of the best ways all of us have for exploring the complexities of our motives, aspirations, conflicts, and ideals – no matter what we do for a living. I love to place literary texts in their various contexts—biographical, historical, theoretical, sociological, and more—and to discuss with students how literary texts illuminate the practice of being human. 

A little about my path to this career: I majored in English in college, and did a study abroad year at Trinity College Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. In graduate school, I specialized in Irish, African-American, and postcolonial literature, and as a scholar I publish in Irish literature, focusing particularly on Irish women writers and Irish writers of color. 

Most of us in English are practicing scholars as well as dedicated teachers, and the crossover of these two activities is something we cherish about working at a research university. Many of my best students over the years have been interested in a range of academic areas that complement English: history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and more. I’ve taught quite a number who have gone into teaching or who have pursued graduate degrees in creative writing or literature – but also many who have pursued careers in law, library science, business, and a host of other fields. SIU provides a very welcoming environment, with a lot of formal and informal advisement (for example, at the University’s Career Development Center), for this process of finding your own individual path in life. 

I’m privileged to teach in a program that favors small classes. Like most of my colleagues, I use a combination of lecture and discussion – mostly discussion – and I am always learning more about the literature I teach from the students in my classrooms.

In addition to the courses for majors and grad students that I ordinarily teach, lately I’ve enjoyed teaching “Vampires” and “Black Speculative Fiction” as undergraduate seminars and “Women in Literature” as an online Core course. Dr. Joe Shapiro, the current Coordinator of Undergraduate Studies in English, can share detailed descriptions for upcoming English courses with you. His email address is jpshapiro@siu.edu.  

All the best to you as you make plans for your next step in life! 

With Saluki Pride,

Dr. Jane Elizabeth Dougherty
Professor, English