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.