Welcome! Meet our Intersectional Mentors for 2022-2023: Dan Martin, James Seth, and Maya Zeller.

Students are invited to make an appointment with one of our mentors for safe, confidential, intersectional support during your time with us. You can meet with a mentor to seek guidance, advice, and encouragement of all kinds. Our Intersectional Mentors have strong areas of expertise, scholarship, ally-ship, service, student engagement, and mentoring experience. 

Mentoring appointments can be made to discuss academic and life issues, career goals, available opportunities, positive reinforcement, or just to talk. Please fill out this application to confidentially request a meeting with the mentor of your choice.

Dan Martin

Biography:

Dr. Dan Martin (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor in the English Department and an associate editor of Kairos, A Journal of Technology, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy. Dr. Martin has graduate degrees in rhetoric and composition and the digital humanities, and he spends most of his time at CWU preparing graduate students to teach writing. He teaches graduate classes on composition history, theory, and pedagogy and undergraduate classes on writing across disciplines and multimodality. Before coming to CWU, Dr. Martin was a faculty member for 15 years at the University of Central Florida where he trained and mentored composition faculty and directed the writing across the curriculum program. Dr. Martin researches digital rhetoric and multimodal writing, writing pedagogy, and writing across disciplines, and he has published in the Journal of Multimodal Rhetoric, Kairos, Composition Studies, The Journal of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Education, and several edited collections on writing pedagogy, multimodality, and digital rhetoric. Currently, Dr. Martin is researching the ways in which digital rhetoric and disinformation connect and disconnect in digital writing environments and how disinformation is networked across platforms.

James Seth

Biography:

Dr. James Seth (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in Early Modern Literature. He has worked in various mentorship positions, including: Honors Thesis Mentor, Master of Arts Thesis Chair, Master of Arts Project Chair, Dissertation Workshop Facilitator, and Writing Center Supervisor. Dr. Seth has also facilitated events on navigating the academic job market and can help mentees with their application packets and supporting materials, including CV/resumes, cover letters, purpose statements, and statements on teaching, research, and diversity.

Additionally, Dr. Seth has experience with mentoring members of the LGBTQ+ community and currently serves as an Advisor for CWU EQuAl (Equality through Queers and Allies). 

His research primarily focuses on early British literature and Shakespeare, as well as maritime history, but he has taught classes on a variety of topics, including 19th-century gothic horror, poetry and poetics, gender and performance, revenge tragedy, early travel writing, and maritime outlaws.

Maya Zeller

Biography:

Maya Jewell Zeller (she/her), is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of of the Lion Rock Visiting Writers Series at CWU. She also serves as poetry editor for the Inland Northwest publisher Scablands Books, and affiliate poetry faculty for Western Colorado University's low-residency MFA. Maya's books include the poetry collection Rust Fish, the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees, and, with visual artist Carrie DeBacker, the interdisciplinary collaboration Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts.

Maya's teaching and research interests include poetry and poetics; social constructivist and inquiry-based pedagogies; environmental, social, gender, racial justice; docupoetics and ecopoetics; prose poetry, experimental and hybrid genres; creative nonfiction; community-building and arts organizing; and collaborative and interdisciplinary projects.

She seeks to mentor students in a range of research and professional pursuits, in creative and academic writing, as well as editing and publishing, as well as graduate school, conference, and residency applications. Past mentees have written about personal family history, immigration and diaspora, empathy and family trauma, high school running culture, and hybrid learning approaches; and have completed projects from verse/epic novellas, to scholarly and archival research-aided creative nonfiction/memoir, to immersive journalism, full-length poetry manuscripts, and multi-genre portfolios. She looks forward to your ideas.