La Sierra University English Graduate Program

Jennifer Pimenta DoNascimento is currently the Vice President of Pepper Fields International Ministries, a nonprofit business based in Southern California with a heart for children around the globe. Pepper Fields International exists to promote positive and life changing connections between children, God, family and nature. As someone who just started being the Vice President at a small but extremely bold organization, Jennifer is learning as much as possible about the nonprofit world while also spending time with children through church initiatives. She is a proud Teach For America 2013 Corps Member, and she is extremely thankful for everything she learned at La Sierra University both as a grad student and as an Adjunct Writing Instructor because those experiences helped her navigate her two years as a TFA English Teacher working at Southwest Early College High School in conjunction with South Texas College. While in Texas, she was able to learn more about the public school system, meet great teachers and interact with amazing students. Now that she is back in Southern California, Jennifer wants to do all she can to help Pepper Fields flourish as it reaches children and helps strengthen family and community ties around the world.

Desiree Lacey is currently completing a MAT with secondary teaching credentials in the LaSU School of Education Curriculum and Instruction program. She uses skills and knowledge, such as literary criticism, literary canons, and research strategies fostered in the English graduate program to construct lesson plans for secondary classrooms. One of her areas of interest is long term student motivation regarding reading and composition projects. She plans to complete the program by Spring 2016.

Besides her academic pursuits, she is working at LaSU as an Adjunct Writing Instructor; she thoroughly enjoys helping students develop critical thinking skills through composition. Furthermore, she has been a part of the undergraduate conference Inclinations and C-SAS 4U workshops. In addition to these professional development activities, she was honored to present an original creative non-fiction piece titled “Lucan 191” as a creative writing panel member during the Nature’s 2015 conference.

Katherine A. Wagner was the first of the LaSU English MA program alums to head to the bluegrass state of Kentucky. After realizing that the South wasn't so scary (although woefully lacking in good Mexican food), she encouraged Tiffany Hutabarat and Megan McDonough to also apply to the University of Louisville. Right now, Katherine is a PhD candidate in Humanities at Univ. of Louisville and is working on an interdisciplinary dissertation that examines the intersections between American horror literature and film, globalization, and placelessness. She is currently a part-time lecturer at both the University of Louisville and Bellarmine University, where she teaches on a wide range of subjects from zombies to crime in popular Victorian culture. She continues to actively present at academic conferences, particularly the Popular Culture Association Conference (a personal favorite as she knows she will get to see LaSU faculty Drs. Winona and Andrew Howe). She has several peer-reviewed academic articles and other scholarship published and forthcoming, including two articles that were co-written with Megan McDonough. When not teaching or researching, Katherine also writes fiction; her short story "Selling Happiness" was written for a class taken with Prof. Sari Forham and is published under the pen name Katherine A. W. Troyer. Katherine hopes to defend her dissertation in Spring 2016. Her Academia.com page address is https://louisville.academia.edu/KatherineWagner/.