Please join us in welcoming the English Department’s newest faculty members: Michael DuBon, Travis Franks, Amber Caron, and Chen Chen. We are so pleased to have them joining the department. 

Lecturer Michael DuBon is a first-generation U.S. citizen of Guatemalan descent and a first generation college graduate. 

He holds an MFA from Saint Mary's College of California and an MIS from Southern Utah University.  His poetry has appeared in The Meadow, Rising Phoenix Review, and Kolob Canyon Review, and his creative nonfiction has appeared in Heartwood. With a background in teaching, tutoring, and academic support services, he teaches general education courses, including English 1010 and English 2010. He is energized by teaching, and committed to helping students succeed in their writing and academic goals. He loves to help students learn how to initiate, revise, and complete academic and creative writing, communicate effectively with college instructors, develop strong study strategies, build their writing confidence, and ultimately experience higher education as a transformative experience.

 

Assistant Professor Travis Franks received his PhD in contemporary multiethnic literatures from Arizona State University. 

His book project, Settler Nativism: Colonial Origins of Anti-Immigrant Sentiment, is an analysis of literatures of the U.S., Australia, and other settler nations in which Travis argues that the current wave of nativism in these countries must be understood in relation to the original and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. His work appears in Ariel, MELUS,American Indian Quarterly, Western American Literature, and elsewhere. He has completed McNair and Fulbright fellowships, served as the non-fiction editor of RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, & Humanities, and curated digital humanities exhibitions for AustLit, the premier online database for the study of Australian literature. He belongs to the Kinship & Reciprocity Collective and is a founding member of the revolving ensemble band known as New Heroes of the Old War.

Assistant Professor Amber Caron earned her MFA from Bennington College.

Amber’s stories and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, AGNI, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, Kenyon ReviewOnline, Longreads, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, the Southwest Review McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Since 2019, she has been an Assistant Fiction Editor at AGNI. Her first book, Lost Person Behavior, will be published by Milkweed in 2023. 

Assistant Professor Chen Chen received her PhD in Communication, Rhetoric, & Digital Media from North Carolina State University. 

Before joining USU, she was an Assistant Professor of English at Winthrop University, Rock Hill, SC. Her research focuses on advocacy and resistant rhetorical practices by marginalized communities as civic and tactical technical communication in transnational contexts. In particular, she has been working on disaster response communications in Chinese and Chinese diasporic communities during COVID-19 and other natural crises as well as the feminist activism of transnational Chinese communities. When she’s not researching or teaching, she’s cooking and doing jigsaw puzzles.