Faculty
Full-Time Faculty
Brian Clements, PhD, is a Professor and Assistant Dean in the Macricostas School of Arts and Sciences. He is author or editor of over a dozen collections of poetry, including, most recently, A Book of Common Rituals (Quale Press) and the New York Times New & Noteworthy anthology Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon Press). His 200-day project Every Atom: Reflections on Whitman at 200 collected commentaries from 200 writers at North American Review. He was the founding Coordinator of the MFA in Creative and Professional Writing.
Higgins Hall 219B
(203) 837-8876
clementsb@wcsu.edu
Kelli Custer, PhD, is a Professor and Coordinator of the Writing Center and First Year Composition. She also works with faculty and students to incorporate writing instruction into classrooms across disciplines. She has served on committees for the International Writing Centers Association and on the Executive Board of the Northwest Writing Centers Association (NEWCA), and hosted the NEWCA Conference at WCSU in 2019. She is a frequent presenter at regional and national conferences on composition, writing program administration, and writing centers. Her research interests include the development of peer tutors’ self-efficacy and changes in writerly confidence.
Ruth Haas Library 303 (inside the Writing Center)
(203) 837-3941
custerk@wcsu.edu
Anthony D’Aries, MFA, is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the MFA in Creative and Professional Writing. He is the author of The Language of Men: A Memoir (Hudson Whitman Press, 2012), which received the PEN/New England Discovery Prize and Foreword’s Memoir-of-the-Year Award. His essays have appeared in Boston Magazine, Memoir Magazine, Solstice, The Good Men Project, Shelf Awareness, and The Literary Review. Anthony has served on the board of PEN/New England as a member of the Freedom-to-Write Committee, leading writing workshops in prisons, shelters, hospitals, and residential care facilities, and co-chairing the inaugural PEN Writing and Trauma Conference. In 2016, he was the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Fort Lyon writer in residence, where he taught writing workshops for homeless veterans.
Higgins Hall 219A
203-837-3252
dariesa@wcsu.edu
Oscar De Los Santos, PhD, is a Professor, Interim Department Chair, and the author of Hardboiled Egg (short stories) and Spirits of Texas and New England (folklore stories), and the editor of Madame Luna and other Moon stories. Oscar’s other books include Infinite Wonderlands (short stories, with David G. Mead) and When Genres Collide (essays, with Thomas J. Morrissey). His essays and stories have appeared in New York Review of Science Fiction, Extrapolation, Connecticut Review, and Saranac Review. His novel, Before Celia, is forthcoming.
Higgins Hall 219E
(203) 837-9044
delossantoso@wcsu.edu
Prof. Bonnie Denmark is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Business/Technical Writing Option. Prior to joining WCSU full-time, she was Senior Writer and Editor at award-winning health and science media companies, producing video, print, and web-based educational and marketing content. She began her career in the tech field as a computational linguist, overseeing linguistic and human factors aspects of software design. She has worked internationally as an educator, writer, editor, literacy specialist, and multimedia curriculum developer with special attention to accessibility issues.
Higgins Hall 219G
(203) 837-8733
denmarkb@wcsu.edu
Edward A. Hagan, PhD, a CSU Professor, has focused his recent scholarship on contemporary Irish and American fiction and essay writing. He is particularly interested in what literary trends tell us about contemporary consciousness. He has just completed a book on contemporary Irish and Irish-American fiction and memoir; it argues that farce is the contemporary writer’s tool for puncturing the balloon of triviality of contemporary culture. Hagan authored a Fall 2007 article that argues sports metaphors have become so pervasive in contemporary society that they restrict our abilities to think outside the box of winning and losing. His memoir, To Vietnam in Vain: Memoir of an Irish-American Intelligence Advisor, 1969-1970, was published in 2015.
Higgins Hall 219D
(203) 837-9045
hagane@wcsu.edu
John Roche, MFA, an Associate Professor, spent more than two decades as an award-winning journalist, mostly covering the Bronx, where he was born and raised. His debut novel, Bronx Bound, was released last year. Professor Roche immerses himself in the culture of the University, collaborating with other departments on various projects, Including Constitution Day. He teaches a full array of Journalism courses and serves as academic advisor to all of our Writing Majors specializing in Journalism. In 2021, Prof. Roche was recipient of the SGA Faculty of the Year award for the second consecutive year.
Higgins Hall 219C
(203) 837-9047
rochej@wcsu.edu
Distinguished Adjunct Faculty
Deatra Anderson
Deatra Haimé Anderson teaches for the English and Writing departments at WCSU. She has written popular culture articles for magazines such as Jane, Vibe, Mothering in the Middle, and Mosaic Literary Magazine, where she is also the book reviews editor. Her current project is co-writing a memoir for Corey Glover, lead singer of the Grammy award-winning band Living Colour.
Leah Begg
Email: beggl@wcsu.edu
Leah’s teaching and research interests include American literature, ecocriticism, gothic and ecogothic, American landscape painting, multimodal composition, and multilingual pedagogy. She has presented papers on James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Cole, deep ecology and Sarah Orne Jewett, the ecogothic and William Faulkner, and Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla. She was recently published in the Spring 2020 edition of the James Fenimore Cooper Society Journal. Leah received her B.A. in English at the University of Pennsylvania, her M.A. in English at WCSU, and is a Ph. D Candidate in English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs where she teaches First-Year Writing and Literature classes.
Kelly L. Goodridge
Email: goodridgek@wcsu.edu
Kelly L. Goodridge has taught writing for over a decade at WCSU. She has written for The Ridgefield Press and Lewisboro Ledger and was awarded the Arthur R. Riel, Jr. Freelance Journalism Award at Fairfield University. Kelly’s recent publications include essays in Reel Rebels, SFRA’s When Genres Collide and TV Rebels: People and Programs That Shaped the Medium, Volumes 1 and 2. Forthcoming publications include: “Madame Luna,” which will appear in a short story collection in 2011 and When the Ape-Hawk Strikes: Book One of A Modern Bestiary (a co-authored YA novel). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University and an MA in English from WCSU. Contact: kellyhasclass@sbcglobal.net.
Hunter Liguore
Email: liguoreh@wcsu.edu
Hunter Liguore, MFA, is a long-time naturalist and activist, she has written on a variety of topics that promote compassionate awareness towards the environment, indigenous rights, and endangered species. A three-time Pushcart-Prize nominee (including 2017), her work has appeared in over a hundred publications worldwide, including: Orion Magazine, Anthropology and Humanism, Bellevue Literary Review, Irish Times, The Mindfulness Bell, Writer’s Chronicle, The Writer Magazine, Great Plains Quarterly, Writer’s Digest Poetry Market, and many more. She was the first place recipient of the 2015 Ethnographic Fiction competition sponsored by the American Anthropological Association. She is also the editor-in-chief of the literary journal American Athenaeum. Her eco-fiction novel, Silent Winter, is forthcoming from Harvard Square Editions. Her work is represented by Regal Hoffman & Associates. Professor Liguore teaches several courses, including a course on the writing life of J.R.R. Tolkien, and has designed and launched “The Writing Garden,” which features some of the work of Western’s students. www.hunterliguore.org
James J. Lomuscio
Email: lomuscio@wcsu.edu
James J. Lomuscio has been a journalist for 30 years, writing for Gannett, The New York Times, Connecticut Post, Stamford Advocate and has served as the editor of Westport News, Westport Magazine and WestportNow.com. He is the winner of four first place writing wards, three from the New England Press Association and one from the Society of Professional Journalists. His book, Village of the Dammed: The Fight for Open Space and the Flooding of a Connecticut Town,was a finalist for the 2006 Connecticut Book Award in Nonfiction, and he is the author of the McGraw Hill textbook, Writing with Your Head and Your Heart: Balancing Logic and Emotion to Create Powerful Nonfiction.
Lisa Rae McCormick
Email: mccormickl@wcsu.edu
Robin DeMerell ProveyEmail: proveyr@wcsu.eduRobin DeMerell Provey has taught in the English and Writing departments at WCSU since 2013. An award-winning journalist, Robin studied journalism at Pace University, where she received the university’s Print Journalism Award. Robin spent more than a decade in the newsroom and has written for The News-Times, The Connecticut Law Tribune, and The Rivertowns Enterprise. Since 2013, she has also been the Public Relations consultant for Danbury Public Schools. Robin has an MA in English literature from WCSU, where she is currently pursuing an MFA in Professional and Creative Writing. Her most recent work, “Seeds of #MeToo Planted under the Orange Trees in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath,” was published in the spring 2020 issue of The Steinbeck Review.
Danielle Troetti
Email: troettid@wcsu.eduDanielle Troetti, MA, believes deeply in education as activism for social justice. She has been teaching “Secondary English Methods” and “Teaching Literature in Schools” through WCSU’s English and Education departments since 20212, but the majority of her professional time is spent at Bethel High School where she has worked as an English Teacher, interventionist, literacy specialist, and instructional coach since the last millennium. Her service on district-wide teams as well as adjuncting at WCSU has provided her with experience ranging from preschool through graduate school levels; she is grateful for the perspective that has bestowed up her a teacher, mother, and advocate for learners of all ages. She presented on summer reading at the CT Reading Association Conference, but relishes in and discusses reading year-round with all who will indulge her (especially reluctant students).
Louisa Burns-Bisogno
Louisa Burns-Bisogno (now retired) is an award-winning screenwriter, director, author, and international media consultant with over 100 on-screen credits and an elected member of the Board of Governors of the National Academy for Television Arts & Sciences. Her movies have been produced on cable TV and on all the major U.S. networks, as well as distributed internationally. Among these are: My Body, My Child with Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Jessica Parker and Cynthia Nixon; Bridge to Silence, with Marlee Matlin. ‘Bridge’ was honored by Women in Film and the Congressional Committee for the Arts at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.
Louisa has trained professional writers in dramatic series techniques in Moscow, Dublin and more recently in Rome. She has written story and scripts for popular American daytime series such as The Young and the Restless, One Life to Live and As the World Turns Louisa was a winner of the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theatre Center. She has had numerous plays produced including Angels and Infidels which she also directed. Seven of Louisa’s plays have been presented by the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for staged readings.
A former council-member of the Writers Guild of America East, Louisa is active on the WGAE Digital Caucus. She is a professor of playwriting, screenwriting and webisode development at Western Connecticut State University.
Louisa’s most recent work, the co-authored The Night John Lennon Died…So Did John Doe, was published in 2015.