About Us: OWL Tutoring Schedule

Our Schedule for FALL 08: Effective 8/25/08 - 12/20/08

• Monday: Joanie Zimmerman
• Tuesday: Jessica Stiles
• Wednesday: Joan Rappaport
• Thursday: Marianna Monaco
• Friday: Dion Farquhar
• Saturday: Dion Farquhar
• Sunday: Joanie Zimmerman

Our Guidelines

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Our Staff

Gwen Ball, OWL Director
Gwen graduated from Mills College in Oakland, Calif., with an MFA in writing. She began teaching English at GGU in 1991, and in 1998 she became one of the first CyberCampus instructors at GGU. Her teaching experience includes a broad spectrum of English courses ranging from basic writing to graduate research-writing and design. She developed and created the online versions of English 10A and 10B and collaborated on the development of English 1B. Currently, she is teaching 1B online and in the fall will teach 10A and 10B online as well. In addition to teaching, she is also the creator and director of The OWL, which opened at GGU in the fall of 1998. Gwen has 3 children, Emily, Cameron and Jackson, and lives with her husband, Steve, and the rest of their clan in Alameda, Calif. When she's not teaching or overseeing the OWL, or rooting her children on at their track, baseball, soccer and band performances, she's swimming (her goal is to swim 120 miles this year); walking her dog, Dorrie, along the bay trails of Alameda; or reading Anthony Trollope novels and British mysteries.

Dion Farquhar, OWL Tutor
Born in 1947, Dion Farquhar can hardly believe the numbers. She is a veteran teacher as well as a poet, prose fiction writer, and cultural critic. A Ph.D. in political theory (New York University), she loves language and what it can do and enjoys helping students express themselves through writing. This fall (2007) she is teaching two sections of the Crown College Core course, "Ethical Issue in Emerging Technologies: Participatory Evolution: from Human to Posthuman," and in Spring 2008, she will teach modern novels, "Narratives of Resistance" at UCSC. Her poetry chapbook won first prize in the 2007 Poets Corner chapbook competition and is available from her (at dnfarquhar at yahoo dot com). She is currently finishing a novel set in the 1980s in Manhattan. Her poems and stories appear in Otoliths, languageandculture.net, AUGHT, Xcp: Streetnotes, Rogue Scholars, The Argotist, Sulfur, Hawaii Review, boundary 2, Lip Service, City Works, Cream City Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, etc.

Jean Gier, OWL Tutor (Substitute)
Jean received her BA in world literature and cultural studies at UC Santa Cruz, and is currently in the PhD program in English at UC Berkeley, where her focus of study is in Filipino-American and American literature of the 20th century. She has been teaching and tutoring writing/reading and composition for over five years, and has done a lot of work with re-entry and transfer students. Jean is a freelance book editor, and co-editor with Mark Young (New Zealand) of The First Hay(na)ku Anthology (of poetry), forthcoming Nov. 2005.

Marianna Monaco, OWL Tutor
Marianna received a BA in Human Development from the University of Kansas, and a DC from Palmer College of Chiropractic West. She has worked as a computer analyst, programmer, and trainer for the accounting department of a telecommunications company, where she has also written user manuals for computer applications. She has been self-employed as a chiropractor, a professional organizer and a dog trainer. She is short story writer and is an award-winning haiku poet. In her time away from OWL, she can be found writing, cooking, planning a vegetable garden, or out with the dogs.

Joan Rappaport, OWL Tutor
Joan Rappaport currently teaches writing and English at Golden Gate University and San Francisco State University. She holds a BA from Oberlin College and a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Joan has taught writing, literature, and Jewish Studies courses at Santa Clara University, Binghamton University, and the University of Massachusetts.

Jessica Stiles, OWL Tutor
Daughter of a wildlife biologist, Jessica was born in Kenya and spent the first eight months of her life in a tent in the Masai Mara. Twenty-one years later, just out of college, she landed a job at the San Francisco County Jail, where she taught literature and personal essay writing to incarcerated mothers. Since then, she has received her MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University, and taught and tutored creative and analytical writing to students of various ages and abilities, including Brooklyn third graders, Columbia PhD candidates, Korean MBA applicants, and Bay Area high school students. A sample of her own writing, published under her maiden name, can be found here: http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/story.php?storyid=1682 . Jessica lives in the Presidio, San Francisco's national park, with her husband T.J . (author of Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War ) and, Dillon, their infant son.

Joanie Zimmerman, OWL Tutor
Joanie has worked as a surveyor at archaeological digs in Britain and Greece, a solid-state physicist, a limnologist, a moon-rock analyst, a teacher, a software-quality assessor, a radio host, a falconry apprentice, a Web-page designer and a software designer. She has a PhD in solid state physics from Oxford University (except the Brits call it a DPhil).); and has recently added two Arts Associate degrees from Cabrillo College: one in Spanish and the other in Psychology. When not reviewing other people's work, she is writing poetry, hiking the mountains, or maintaining three web sites that include: reports of a monthly 11-mile banana-slug and wild-flower survey (http://www.icogitate.com/~tree/bigBasinSlugSpotted.htm ); and a blog of books she has read (http://members.cruzio.com/~zdino/bookReviews/jz.book.blog.htm).

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