English English Adjunct Faculty
Office: Reynolds Hall 106
Email: wjackson@westmont.edu
Phone: (805) 565-7220
A native of Atlanta, Wendy Eley Jackson has over 25 years of experience in film and television. She received her B.A. in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.F.A. in Screenwriting from the University of Georgia. Professor Jackson is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara, where she teaches screenwriting. She serves as the CEO of Auburn Avenue Films, a production company specializing in entertainment that brings social awareness and engages audiences to participate in social change.
Her experience in the media industry ranges from working in made-for-television movies for TriStar/Columbia Pictures Television, to advertising and marketing with Turner Entertainment Networks, to developing television pilots for major networks. She recently received the Producers Guild of America mark for her work on the feature-length documentary Maynard, which explores the life and legacy of Atlanta’s first black mayor. Currently, she is the Executive Producer of the documentary Welcome To Pine Lake and is in post-production for her latest documentaries, Her Inescapable Brave Mission and Counting The Ballots. In addition, she serves as a board member for Women in Film Atlanta, the Atlanta Film Society, the BronzeLens Film Festival, and the National Association for Television Arts and Sciences.
Office: Reynolds Hall 204
Office Hours: Monday, Wednesday, & Friday 9:30-10:25 am & 3:15-3:45 pm
Email: rminor@westmont.edu
Ryan Minor is an Africanist with a specialization in twentieth century West African culture (specifically Anglophone countries like Ghana and Nigeria). Since 2016 Dr. Minor has taught upper and lower division courses on African history and literature. When teaching African literature courses, he focuses on the ways that authors, artists, filmmakers, and musicians from the continent use fiction to recount, wrestle with, and challenge popular understandings of their cultures. He is particularly committed in using this creative content to debunking the “Western” myth of Africa as the “dark continent” – the longstanding narrative that Africa is a place without meaningful cultural or social achievements prior to the arrival of Europeans.
Dr. Minor has several years of experience teaching composition courses. He loves introducing students to concepts like genre awareness, rhetorical analysis, imagined audiences, discourse communities and how to read like a writer. Dr. Minor believes that teaching these concepts provides students with a framework to improve their writing, and a set of tools to help them compose the narrative of their academic and social lives at Westmont and beyond.
Currently, Dr. Minor is interested in analyzing graphic novels and animated films that fictionalize major events of the twentieth century (books like Maus and Persepolis, and films like Grave of the Fireflies). Over the last five years, he has developed a pedagogy for using these types of sources, which combine both written and visual rhetoric, as core teaching materials for college English and history courses. In 2021 he saw these efforts come to fruition in a course he designed and taught at UCSB titled Historical Fiction. He is also in the early stages of developing his own fictional graphic novel based on the lives of African soldiers, who fought for the British in Burma (Myanmar) during World War II.
Office: Reynolds Hall 205
Office Hours: Tuesday 1:30-3:30 pm & by appointment
Email: willis@westmont.edu
Paul Willis published an article entitled “‘He Hath Builded the Mountains’: John Muir’s God of Glaciers” in the journal Christianity & Literature. He gave poetry readings in April 2022 at the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and at the UCSB Sedgwick Reserve in the Santa Ynez Valley. He published an essay, “My Date with Mary Oliver,” in Books & Culture and an essay, “Gumdrops” in Cresset. His poems appear in two recent anthologies: Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide (Paraclete Press) and What Breathes Us: Santa Barbara Poet Laureates 2005-2015 (Gunpowder Press).
Following his retirement from Westmont in December 2022, Prof. Willis was invited to share his poetry at the Westmont College chapel on April 17, 2023. The video can be viewed here.