Quinn White

            “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It's that easy, and that hard.” – Neil Gaiman

            Students like Quinn White, a graduate student who received her M.A. in English at the University of Montevallo in 2010, can attest to the coupled joys and challenges of writing that are so often the part and parcel of literary studies in higher education. But the end result is a richly rewarding one nonetheless, as Quinn’s account reveals.   

            Although she is now pursuing an MFA and works as a teaching assistant in Virginia, Quinn first sharpened her writing abilities through the early education she received. Having earned her B.A. from Montevallo, Quinn found coming back to UM via the M.A. in English program to be an excellent stepping stone on the way to obtaining her doctorate—an embarking that she described as “returning home to the enrichment of her undergraduate years.”

            Consequently, Quinn’s return to UM as an academic home was an easy choice to make based on her previous experiences in what she described as the “stellar English Department” that consisted of instructors who were “experts in their fields,” which range from medieval and eighteenth-century literature, to Romanticism, British modernism, and beyond. Added to these specialties was the unique, small class size that enabled her graduate courses to function as interactive and engaging seminars that were held with only a handful of her peers.

             In detailing the key factors that have helped her to be so successful in her current pursuits, Quinn cited her fostering by the approachable UM English faculty that both “encouraged [her] curiosities” and her “creativity” along the way. While enrolled as a graduate student, Quinn was able to be a part of many opportunities that engaged her inherent creative abilities: The Tower student publication, the Montevallo Literary Arts Festival, the Jeremy Lepsi Poetry Fellowship, and academic conferences.

If Quinn was exposed to a thorough assortment of endeavors that piqued her creative interests, she also obtained an excellent grounding for another passion of hers while at UM: instruction and assisting students. Quinn served as a graduate writing consultant for UM’s own Harbert Writing Center for a couple of years, and upon graduation, she even had the opportunity to be employed as an adjunct English instructor, which she said “prepared her to work” in her current position.

Since her attendance and work at UM, Quinn has performed the role of poetry editor and visual arts managing editor for creative writing journals, such as Toad the Journal and the Minnesota Review alongside her duties as a teaching assistant. Quinn plans to obtain her MFA in poetry in 2014.