Jesus (Jesse) Vazquez is the Founder and CEO of J.A.N. Consulting Group, Inc. http://www.jancg.com/; a boutique consulting firm focused on the Foodservice industry. Previously, Dr. Vazquez owned and operated several high-volume restaurants, a catering company, and a management company. He is a former Senior Business Analyst for Brickell Opportunity Partners, a venture capital firm, and mentor and workshop presenter for SCORE.

Dr. Vazquez has counseled industry professionals on leadership and improving operational and financial performance. He is an accomplished, resourceful, and versatile business executive with 30+ years of experience in multi-unit business operations, leadership development, high-performance team coaching, research processes, and the hiring and training of staff for the successful management of high-visibility, high-volume business operations.

Dr. Walsh strives to ally scientific, academic, stakeholder, and policy objectives of fisheries and aquaculture with an inclusive, multi-operational approach that involves fishermen, students, academia, managers, policymakers, industry, and the public to establish effective mechanisms for sustainable utilization and stewardship of these resources.

After completing her undergraduate degree at Rutgers University, Dr. Walsh worked as a laboratory technician for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Marine Fisheries Service, at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Sandy Hook, NJ. This opportunity paved her career in fish culture, as working with the Life History and recruitment Group offered the experience of rearing local fishery - important marine species. Those species were reared to examine environmental influences on growth, development, morphology, and mortality of larvae and juveniles — ultimately contributing to the best scientific information available for use in fishery stock assessments.

Dr. Walsh’s experience then broadened to focus on hatchery and release strategies for flatfish stock enhancement both in the U.S. (as Graduate student at the University of New Hampshire) and Japan (where she spent 2 years as a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow working with Japanese scientists, hatchery managers, and fishermen). Subsequently, she spent 3 years concentrating on sustainable seafood as a Fishery Policy Analyst for the Office of Sustainable Fisheries at NOAA Fisheries Service in Silver Spring, MD. Walsh’s research interests center on the early life of fish species, including nutritional requirements and feeding behavior.

Emily Schulten Weekley is the author of Rest in Black Haw. Her work appears in Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, The Missouri Review, Barrow Street, and Tin House, among others. Weekley earned her MA from Western Kentucky University and her PhD from Georgia State University. She received the 2016 Erskine J. Prize for Poetry and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

At CFK, Dr. Weekly teaches Introduction to Creative Writing, Beginning Poetry Writing, Beginning Fiction Writing, English Composition I and II, and Advanced Communications in Business. She is also the advisor for the CFK Creative Writing Club and organizer of the CFK Poetics Visiting Poets Series.

Teaching Philosophy:

Fyodor Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov, "[T]he sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish - such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them." This sacrifice is one that each of our students is making. The way that students learn to use language is the cornerstone of their success in all disciplines; it is for this reason, after all, that composition is a prerequisite. Their success in this facet of their leaning is my job, my contribution toward this sacrifice. To expose students to the richness of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, to show them how to get close to a text, is one of the most exciting parts of my job. When I can lead students to see the power and purpose their writing can have and help them to see how they can best utilize that power and that purpose, then we have done our job in our classroom community.