Faculty
Meet the Faculty
Jen Ferguson
Assistant Professor of Creative Writing
B.A., York University
M.A., University of Windsor
Ph.D., University of South Dakota
Email: jlferguson@coe.edu
Dr. Jen Ferguson (she/her) is Métis and white, an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice armed with a PhD. She believes writing, teaching and beading are political acts. Her debut YA novel, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet (Heartdrum/HarperCollins) won a 2022 Governor General's Literary Award and is a 2023 Stonewall Honor Book. Her other novels are Those Pink Mountain Nights, A Constellation of Minor Bears and Like Glass. She is a citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation.
Gina Hausknecht
John William King Professor of Literature and Creative Writing
B.A., Oberlin College
M.A., Ph.D., University of Michigan
Phone: 319.399.8417
Email: ghauskne@coe.edu
Dr. Gina Hausknecht teaches early modern British literature, Shakespeare, non-fiction graphic novels, literature of incarceration, and restorative justice. She directs Coe’s Justice Learning Initiative which offers community education about the impacts of the criminal legal system as well as college courses at Anamosa State Penitentiary. She is the co-editor of Shakespeare in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Routledge, 2025). Her ongoing research on the textual history of stage directions in editions of Shakespeare is reflected in the interactive online learning tool All the World's a Stage Direction.
Margaret LeMay
Assistant Professor of English
B.A., Barnard College
M.F.A., University of Iowa
Email: mlemay@coe.edu
Professor Margaret LeMay is the author of sample.spring, a poetry collection available from Finishing Line Press. Her work was a recent finalist for The Iowa Review Awards and has been shortlisted for the Four Way Books Levis Prize, the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, and the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Award. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Brink, the North American Review, The Cortland Review, The Iowa Review and elsewhere. Her work also can be dialed up at two U.S. locations of the Telepoem Booth and has served as title and movement titles for a piano quintet commissioned by the Library of Congress. Professor LeMay teaches poetry and creative writing.
Amber Shaw
Henry and Margaret Haegg Associate Professor of English, Chair
National Fellowship Advisor
B.A., Rhodes College
M.A., Ph.D., The University of Georgia
Phone: 319.399.8058
Email: ashaw@coe.edu
Dr. Amber Shaw is currently Chair of the English, Creative Writing, and Communication Studies Department and teaches courses in nineteenth-century American and transatlantic literature. She was selected as an Associated Colleges of the Midwest-Mellon Academic Leadership Fellow for 2025-2027, which recognizes potential academic leaders in the humanities within the college consortium. Her research primarily focuses on nineteenth-century factory literature and transatlantic literary responses to the Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills; her recent scholarship has appeared in journals such as ESQ, Women’s Studies, and Symbiosis. She regularly works with students as they prepare honors theses and co-directed the Fall 2018 Associated Colleges of the Midwest Advanced Seminar in the Humanities at the Newberry Library in Chicago. In addition to Dr. Shaw’s research and teaching, she serves as Coe’s National Fellowship Advisor for student and faculty awards. In this role, she directs all aspects of the campus application process for highly competitive awards, such as the Truman Scholarship, Goldwater Scholarship, Rhodes Scholarship, and Fulbright Awards (for faculty and students). She loves working with students and faculty across the College on these applications and learning more about different fields.
Melissa Sodeman
Professor of English
B.A., University of Washington, Seattle
M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
Phone: 319.399.8696
Email: msodeman@coe.edu
Melissa Sodeman teaches courses on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature at Coe. Other interests include women writers, the history of the novel, book history and (increasingly) environmental literature. Her book, Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History, was published by Stanford University Press in 2015, and her essays have appeared in SEL, ELH and Modern Philology. Her current research, which grows out of her interest in the intertwined histories of books and affect, investigates how books mediated an intensifying love of nature in the later eighteenth century.
Emeritus and Retired Faculty
Charles Aukema
Professor of English, Emeritus
A.B., Calvin College
M.F.A., University of Iowa, Iowa Writers' Workshop
Email: caukema@coe.edu
In addition to teaching creative writing, Professor Aukema taught computer applications in writing. These applications included writing hypertext fiction. He is the founder of The Coe Review, the college's nationally known literary magazine.
Robert D. Drexler
Whipple Professor of English, Emeritus
B.A., Amherst College
M.A., University of Iowa
Ph.D., University of Chicago
Email: rdrexler@coe.edu
Author of two poetry chapbooks, Dr. Drexler was the director of the ACM Japan studies Program, director of the India Studies Program at Puna, and a Fulbright Lecturer at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. His primary areas of focus are Early Modern British, Medieval English, 20th Century British, Irish and Asian Literature.
Terry Heller
Howard Hall Professor of English, Emeritus
A.B., North Central College
A.M., Ph.D., University of Chicago
Dr. Heller is author of The Delights of Terror and The Turn of the Screw: Bewildered Vision, and editor of Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Fiction. He has written reference articles, short fiction, and literary journal essays. He is the manager of the on-line archive, the Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project.
Gordon Mennenga
Professor of English
B.A., University of Northern Iowa
M.F.A., University of Iowa, Iowa Writers' Workshop
Email: gmenneng@coe.edu
Professor Mennenga is a fiction writer whose short story, "Peepers" won a Nelson Algren Award. He has written monologues for Garrison Keilor and a film based on a monologue was released in 1999. Professor Mennenga teaches film and creative writing and is the academic advisor for Coe's nationally circulated magazine, the Coe Review. His academic interests include hip hop music and popular culture.
Ann Struthers
National Fellowship Advisor (retired)
B.A., Morningside College
M.A., Ph.D., University of Iowa
Email: astruthe@coe.edu
Dr. Struthers is the author of two chapbooks and two collections of poetry. She has published numerous book reviews, articles in literature reference books, academic essays and short fiction and was Writer in Residence at Coe for many years. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Syria and in Sri Lanka, and was the faculty advisor for students and faculty who apply for Fulbright, Goldwater, Truman, Rhodes and Marshall Fellowships.