Faculty Authors

Overview and Accomplishments

Our distinguished faculty authors are dedicated to sharing their talents with the wider world through the publication of their texts. They inspire and challenge us, enrich our college community, and continue the important tradition of sharing the written word.

Professor Beth O'Leary Anish, Ph.D.

Anish is the author of Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK: Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism, which addresses the concerns of Irish America in the post-war era by studying its fiction and the authors who brought the communities of their youth to life on the page. The book is part of publisher Palgrave-Macmillan's "New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature" series.

In addition to her most recent publication, Anish also wrote a dissertation on Irish ethnic identity formation in the United States and the creation of the Irish-American narrative titled, Writing Irish America: Communal Memory and the Narrative of Nation in Diaspora. She habeths been published in the New Hibernia Review and is an active member of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Assistant Professor Jessica Araújo, MFA

Jessica Araújo (she/her) graduated from William Paterson University, BA, MA, and MFA. with degrees in Literature and Creative Writing. She specializes in Victorian Literature and Young Adult Fiction.  She has presented papers, “’Are You a Woman?’ Bathsheba’s Gender Panic in Far from the Madding Crowd,” “The Cycle of Poverty in ‘Love is for Vanishing into the Sky’” and “Deconstructing the Masculine/Feminine Binary in Jane Austen’s Emma,” and will present "Student Retention through Student Responsibility in the Time of COVID-19" in April 2022 at the Transitions and Transactions Conference hosted by The Borough of Manhattan Community College. Jessica has also recently had her short story, "Blood Sisters,"  published in Midnight & Indigo.

"Blood Sisters" Short Story

Professor William Dalessio, Ph.D.

Dalessio's book "Are We What We Eat?" Food and Identity in Late Twentieth-Century American Ethnic Literature explores the ways that food can signify one's cultural and/or gender identity in literature and, more broadly, in the culture that produces it. To this end, Dalessio analyzes eight novels and memoirs by American immigrants and their descendants, such as Julia Alverez, Gish Jen, Tina DeRosa, and Andrew Pham, who prominently feature scenes of cooking and eating in their respective texts. Besides his book, Dalessio has published several articles on race, ethnicity, gender, and class in peer-reviewed journals, such as a/b: auto/biography studies, The Southern Quarterly, and Studies in the Humanities. Before joining CCRI as a full-time faculty member in 2013, Dalessio taught courses in literature, composition, and cultural studies at several schools, including the University of Connecticut where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D.--both in English, the University of Rhode Island, and Bryant University. Currently, Dalessio is a Professor of English at the Community College of Rhode Island.

Associate Professor Maura Faulise, MFA, MAT

Maura Faulise’s poetry appears in New Ohio Review,Tar River Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, Third Wednesday, San Pedro River Review, and Connecticut Literary Anthology. Her flash fiction piece "Knot," is published in Quartz Literary.

Faulise is Associate Professor of Writing and Literature at Community College of Rhode Island. She recently earned a Master of Fine Arts in Writing (MFA) from Pacific University—where she had the good fortune of studying with Dorianne Laux, Joesph Millar, Danusha Laméris, Kwame Dawes, Chris Abani, and Ellen Bass. She also holds a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) from Brown University and completed her B.A. in English at Mount Holyoke College.

Before joining CCRI in 2017, Faulise taught first-year writing and literature courses as a Practitioner-in-Residence at University of New Haven, and a wide range of courses at community colleges in Connecticut and New Jersey. At Cumberland County College in Vineland, NJ, she served as interim Assistant to the President for Special Projects / Director of the University Center.

Faulise’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Professor Karen Griscom

Karen Griscom's research engages with early modern and eighteenth-century literature, translation studies, and women's writing. Her recent work has been recognized through invited talks, conference presentations, editorial contributions, prizes, grants, and forthcoming publications.

Her research excellence has been recognized with notable awards, including the Committee Prize at the 2022 Annual Conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) for her paper "'Loud Sounds of Joy': Music in Aphra Behn's Pindaric Odes."

In April 2024, she delivered an invited talk at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) in Toronto, Canada. Her presentation, "Annotating the Past: Students' Critical Engagement with The Lady's Museum," examined how student annotation fosters critical engagement with early women's periodicals. This work, which contributes to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) in eighteenth-century studies, will be published in a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies in May 2026, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the ASECS Women's Caucus.

In November 2024, she presented "Cultural Mediation and Translational Networks: Charlotte Lennox's Reworkings in The Memoirs of the Countess of Berci" at the international conference Imaginary Communities: Reading, Writing, and Translating Early Modern Women's Fiction at the University of Huelva, Spain. This conference, part of the European Research Project Women and the Early Novel in English: The European Context, 1621–1699, examines women's contributions to literary culture and translation networks across Europe. Her travel was supported by a grant from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender.

In March 2025, she will present at the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Annual Meeting in Boston. Her paper, "Translating Pastoral: Women's Intermedial Contributions to the Legacy of Guarini's Il Pastor fido," will be delivered for the panel "Transforming Poetic and Human Form." This research explores how early modern women adapted and reshaped Guarini's influential pastoral drama across textual and visual media.

Karen’s recent publications include a review of Margaret J. M. Ezell's The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 5: 1645–1714: The Later Seventeenth Century, published in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830. She has also recently joined The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats as a contributing editor, with her essays on recent Margaret Cavendish scholarship forthcoming in the Spring 2025 issue.

Looking ahead, Karen is co-editing a special issue on Women's Translation for Women's Writing, an international journal dedicated to the study of women's literature from the Middle Ages through the long nineteenth century.

Associate Professor Eileen James, Ph.D.

Eileen James spent much of the early 1990s as a spoken word artist, performing her poetry in Providence and Boston. She earned a spot in the Providence Poetry Slam Team, performed with the other road poets in the spoken word Revival Tent at Lollapalooza 1994, and served as an opening act for MTV’s Spoken Word Tour when it came to Providence during the same year. Having received her MFA in poetry from Brown University, Eileen worked closely with her thesis advisor, Michael Harper, and poets C.D. Wright and Keith Waldrop to develop her poetry collection Exploding Slowly. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including RIBOT, Innisfree, Syncopated City, Monsters and the Monstrous, and Rag Shock. Eileen’s research interests include writing pedagogy and the rhetoric of power and privilege. Her published research includes “Preparing Graduate Students for the Field: A Graduate Student Praxis Heuristic for WPA Professionalization and Institutional Politics” in WPA: Writing Program Administration; “Encouraging Connections to Support a Positive Culture of Writing Assessment: Adjunct Composition Instructors, Students, and Campus Resources” in Teaching English in the Two Year College; and “Anita Hill in Kenneth Burke’s Cycle of Redemption: Can a Black Woman Morticant Disrupt the Hierarchy?” in the National Association of African American Studies Conference Monograph Series.

Along with her coauthors, Eileen received the 2015 Award for Graduate Writing in Writing Program Administration Studies for the paper “Navigating Murky Waters: Graduate Students in a University-Wide General Education Writing Assessment Initiative” from the Council of Writing Program Administrators. Eileen took part in the launch of SciWrite - University of Rhode Island, a $500,000 National Science Foundation-funded science communication initiative, which supported STEM graduate student writing, serving as part of the writing assessment team. She is currently working to adapt her dissertation “Black Feminist Autoethnography: How Identity Can Affect Peer Review Practices in the College Writing Classroom” into a text.

Associate Professor Charles Kell, Ph.D.

Charles Kell’s poetry and fiction have appeared in the New Orleans Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Kestrel, Columbia Journal, The Pinch and elsewhere. Recent work appears in The Brooklyn Review, Laurel Review, and Hobart.

Kell is an Associate Professor of English at the Community College of Rhode Island and associate editor of the Ocean State Review. He recently completed a PhD at the University of Rhode Island with a dissertation on experimental writing, criminality and transgression in the work of James Baldwin, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joanna Scott and C.D. Wright. Kell is the author of Cage of Lit Glass, a book of poems chosen by Kimiko Hahn as winner of the 2018 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. Pierre Mask, another work by Kell, was winner of the 2019 James Tate Poetry Chapbook Prize.

Ishmael Mask

Professor Denise Parrillo, MA

Parrillo coedited Social Order and Authority in Disney and Pixar Films. This collection initiates a conversation about how Disney and Pixar films challenge or perpetuate traditional power dynamics (or do both). Depictions of surveillance, racial segregation, othering, and ableism represent real issues that impact people. Storytellers often oversimplify or mischaracterize these complex matters on screen. To counter this, contributors investigate unspoken and sometimes unintended meanings, uncovering underlying ideologies. Denise F. Parrillo has been a faculty member since 2008. Her areas of interest include women’s and working-class literature/studies and critical theory. Previously, her focus on ecocriticism led her to work as a Campaign Organizer for a national nonprofit environmental organization where she helped develop grassroots and grasstops solutions to address climate change and diesel pollution.

Sharyn Haddad Vicente

An Amazon Bestselling Author, Sharyn Haddad Vicente, has released three psychological thrillers; Love me, Obey Me, and Forgive Me, and has contributed several short stories to anthologies.

Stop Me, is Book 4 in the final novel in the Paige Vale Psychological Thriller Series and is due for release at the end of this year.

Sharyn has a knack for transporting readers into the depths of her characters' twisted minds where they can uncover the haunting truth - we all have some darkness buried within.

A writer, educator, and artist, Sharyn is a lifelong Rhode Islander. She lives there with her husband of 38 years and her adult children. She received a Master's degree in Adult Education from the University of Rhode Island, as well as a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Rhode Island College - both of which continue to help her craft her bone-chilling prose. Sharyn also teaches writing courses at the Community College of Rhode Island.

Sharyn's mission is to captivate readers, one word at a time.