Written by Regina Ender
Dr. Windy Counsell Petrie has always cared that those around her seize opportunities to read. Even in kindergarten, she was consumed with helping her classmates learn to read. Dr. Petrie’s passion for reading is interwoven throughout her life and career as a student and educator.
While pursuing her bachelor’s degree in English from Pepperdine University, she was given the Outstanding Graduate in the Humanities Award and graduated summa cum laude. During her master’s program at the University of Delaware, she won the Graduate Assistant Teaching Award. After she finished her doctorate from the University of Delaware, she taught at Colorado Christian University for 15 years and earned a Fulbright Scholarship to Vilnius University in Lithuania.
Dr. Petrie’s most recent published work is her essay “Resisting Dismissal: Working-Class Women in the Progressive-Era Fiction of Edna Ferber and Mary Roberts Rinehart,” which will soon be published in Modernist Women and American Social Engagement. Last year, she published “Zora Neale Hurston Reconsidered” in the third volume of American Writers Retrospective. Dr. Petrie’s work emphasizes women’s empowerment through literature. Currently she is working on a book entitled “Professions of Authorship: American Women’s Literary Autobiography in the 1930s.” In her chapter, “American Everywomen,” she focuses on the autobiographies of Mary Roberts Rinehart and Edna Ferber. Dr. Petrie argues that these women’s memoirs reveal their entrepreneurial approach as authors and businesswomen who see domestic and professional life as mutually supportive rather than at odds with one another. In November, Dr. Petrie will present the chapter at the Pacific & Ancient Modern Languages Association national conference.
Since arriving at APU, Dr. Petrie has made herself at home among the English Department’s faculty and students. She urges her students to make their love of literature a priority amidst their busy college schedules. In each class, her goal is to teach students things that are useful, beautiful, and true. By the end of every semester, she hopes that students will continue to utilize what they wrote and discussed in class to enrich their daily lives.
In her time as Department Chair, Dr. Petrie has paid homage to those who came before her through growing endowments in their honor. When Dr. David Esselstrom retired, Dr. Petrie established the Esselstrom Prize, a $1,000 award given annually to an outstanding creative writing student. In addition, Since 2010, the department has held the Dr. James L. Hedges Distinguished Lecture Series, which features authors to speak on campus. This year’s speaker with be author Shirley Geok-lin Lim, who writes on the intersections of race, gender, and social identity.
Lim, will speak on campus at 7pm on Tuesday October 23rd. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Words of Wisdom: “There’s always something new to learn, an unexplored direction in which to grow. You have to start with that premise, whether you’re the teacher or the student.”
