Dr. Melissa Brotton is Associate Professor of English at La Sierra University. Her areas of focus are nineteenth-century British literature and ecotheology. Her most current work is in Sabbath studies and Adventist ecology. Dr. Brotton fell in love with online teaching during the 2020 Pandemic year and began a new phase in her career. She has a special interest in creating instructor presence and fostering learner engagement and deep cognition through the creation of vibrant questions. She has spent the past two years teaching online courses in literature and writing and hopes to teach many more online courses.

Jill Walker Gonzalez is an as Assistant Professor of English at La Sierra University in Riverside, California, where she specializes in teaching early American literature, nineteenth-century American literature, Native American literature and U.S. Latin@ literature. Her main research focus is on references to Poland in nineteenth-century American literature, and she has published in Polish American Studies. Walker Gonzalez has presented papers at various conferences including the Polish American Historical Association Conference, the American Historical Association Conference, the Western Conference on Christianity and Literature, the Southwest Popular Culture and American Culture Association Conference, the Pacific American Modern Language Association Conference, and the Nineteenth Century Studies Association Conference.

Dr. Erin Banks-Kirkham holds a BA in English/Writing from Andrews University, an MA in English (emphasis in children’s literature), and a PhD in English, with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Writing.  At La Sierra, she trains and mentors the College Writing Instructors (English graduate students) who teach the first-year writing sequence.  Online instruction has been an area of interest for Dr. Banks since her graduate work at Ball State University. Teaching writing online has been widely done for several decades, so many of her courses in writing pedagogy addressed online writing instruction.