Category: 2024 New Faculty

Professor D’Angelo Bridges

Please join the WWU English community in welcoming D’Angelo Bridges and getting to know him through this series of icebreaker questions.

Where did you live/work before coming to Western?

I lived in State College, Pennsylvania at Penn State University before coming to Western Washington University. I was a high school English teacher in California before moving to Pennsylvania. 

What is your area of specialty?

My specialties include African American rhetoric, Christian rhetoric, and African American literature. 

What do you like so far about being at Western?

I really love the spirit of Western students, my amazing colleagues, and the campus. Western students are hardworking, earnest people who, for the most part, enjoy the challenges of higher education. I admire their collective tenacity. In addition to the students, Western faculty are equal parts inspiring and encouraging. I could not have possibly asked for a better bunch of colleagues and friends with which to work. Finally, Western’s campus is so beautiful. I have often looked at the majestic forest near campus and marveled at the wild life that crawls and prances out it. (I’m not at all creeped out by its vastness or its darkness.)

What stirs joy within you outside of your work?

Travel has stirred so much joy in me. Because I am so eager to see the world, traveling has been an absolute “joy divine,” to quote Milton Biggham, to do. I am no ways tired of it. 

What is your secret “superpower”?  Tell us something that others may not know about you.

I don’t know that I have a superpower, but if I had to guess, I’d say that I have a knack for remembering obscure information that most people don’t care to know. 

Professor Cori Winrock

Please join the WWU English community in welcoming Cori Winrock and getting to know her through this series of icebreaker questions.

Where did you live/work before coming to Western?

Before coming to Western I lived in Cleveland, OH where I taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Before that I was in a PhD program in Salt Lake City where I marveled at the sea monkeys and the strangeness of being surrounded by mountains. And before that I was in the fairytale woods of Western New York, where I was raised.

What is your area of specialty?

My area of specialty is the line and how to break it. Though I work across genres and am always ransacking the museum of craft as I am writing—underneath everything I do is my training in poetry, its attention to the tiniest piece of punctuation as a way of communicating.

What do you like so far about being at Western?

The students! Wow, what a fantastic set of minds at work on the world. I run my classes as inquiries and the students have shown up so fully for these conversations. Every class is unpredictable in the best way. And also, the sculptures on campus—look at all this art we get to walk through each day. On the way to and from my office I walk through a Noguchi and up and down Stadium Piece. I love to sit in the circular windows of Nancy Holt’s Stone Enclosure and am so glad it’s finally reopened.

What stirs joy within you outside of your work?

Curiosity and the unexpected. Even when I can’t find joy, I can find curiosity. My kids childsplain how things work to me all the time—and it’s such a great balance to so much destructive explaining going on in the world. Taking careful care of things—having my shoes resoled, finding new ways to reuse a material.  

What is your secret “superpower”?  Tell us something that others may not know about you.

I have two superpowers. The first is time—I know exactly how much time something will take to do or how long it will take to get somewhere. I can break it down backwards or imagine it forwards. This is not as useful as you would think. The other is having a snapshot-like memory for details. I’m like Sean Spencer in that mid-aughts show Psych. I could totally have been a fake psychic detective. Instead, I am a writer obsessed with the gorgeous nonlinearity of lyric time and how specificity of detail can translate into an image-based narrative.    

Professor Noam Dorr

Please join the WWU English community in welcoming Professor Noam Dorr and getting to know him through this series of icebreaker questions.

Where did you live/work before coming to Western?

I was an assistant professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock for two years before coming to Western. I sometimes miss the prairie dogs that would pop up all over the place, but I’m thrilled to be in Bellingham now.

What is your area of specialty?

Technically creative nonfiction. My artistic home is the essay, but my departures from that home take on pretty wild forms—sometimes they look like film, sometimes a performance, a physical object, or a novel. Thematically I focus on the Middle East, where I’m from, but I also teach global literatures more broadly and many works in translation.  

What do you like so far about being at Western?

The students are incredible here, just so full of curiosity and willingness to challenge themselves. I get the sense that they’re really committed to shaping their own education. And I’d also say: walking every day past the arboretum on one side and the ocean on the other definitely doesn’t hurt! 

What stirs joy within you outside of your work?

The ridiculousness of my children. Cooking for others. Being near or in a body of water. 

What is your secret “superpower”?  Tell us something that others may not know about you.

One of my greatest guilty pleasures is the television show Chopped where chefs are tasked with making meals from random (and often incongruous!) ingredients. I’ve been told that I’m quite good at taking a set of disconnected ingredients and turning them into something other people wish they were eating. In some ways this is not unlike my creative work—often I find that the most interesting essays for me to write (and read) involve putting together disconnected subjects to see what happens when they speak to one another. 

Professor Felicia Cosey.

Please join the WWU English community in welcoming Professor Felicia Cosey and getting to know her through this series of icebreaker questions.

Where did you live/work before coming to Western?

I lived in Jackson, MS and taught at Jackson State University, home of the Sonic Boom of the South, for seven years.  Before that, I lived in Texas and Kentucky.  I grew up, however, in the Midwest.

What is your area of specialty?

My area of specialty is film and media studies, with an emphasis on representations of subjects at the margins.  I really love delving into the cultural aspects of film and media because it provides a reflection, at times distorted, of societies.

What do you like so far about being at Western?

I love my students.  I’m also very appreciative of my colleagues who have been so welcoming.

What stirs joy within you outside of your work?

I’m an animal lover.  I love sitting outside watching and listening to wildlife.  When I’m wrapped up in my own issues, it’s nice to go outside and just reset.  For example, one day, when I was in Mississippi, I was frustrated with my writer’s block, so I when across the street to the city park.  A Ruby-throated Hummingbird was flitting around a flower near me.  And it dawned on me that this tiny animal had traveled several hundreds of miles across the Gulf of Mexico, and he wasn’t complaining about life—just refueling so he could continue his journey north.

What is your secret “superpower”?  Tell us something that others may not know about you.

If I root for you to win, you WILL lose.