Faculty

Ryan Rickrode

Professor of English

Ryan is particularly interested in the ways writers return to old stories—to myths and to fairy tales—and work to make them new again. He’s also interested in the techniques 20th and 21st writers use to create portrayals of Christianity that are compelling to a wide secular audience. He loves teaching writing and working with students on their writing.

Ryan’s own fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in many journals, including The Cresset, Dappled Things, The South Carolina Review, and Ruminate Online. His novella The Mountains May Depart was an honorable mention for the 2020 Landmark Prize from Homebound Publications and a finalist for the 2019 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize from Texas Review Press. He also serves as fiction editor at Solum Literary Press and is currently at work on a novel that retells and weaves together a number of Grimms’ fairy tales.
You can find his work at his author website, ryan-rickrode.com.

Rachel Strayer

Adjunct Instructor of English

Rachel Luann Strayer is a playwright, theatre artist, author, educator, and a firm believer in the Oxford comma. Her first full-length play, Drowning Ophelia, was published by Blue Moon Plays in 2021 and has been performed across the country, from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and internationally in Canada, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Other full-length plays include The Poe Asylum, Songbird (Premiere Stages Finalist, Henley Rose Finalist), The Last Daughter (Jane Chambers Award for Feminist Playwriting Finalist), A Decameron for the Apocalypse, After Jane, and Laertes Dies Too (Premiere Stages Semi-Finalist). Dozens of her short plays and monologues have found audiences in the United States and Canada through high schools, universities, and companies like The Bechdel Group, Disrupt Theatre Company, The Femme Fatale Play Festival, and Creative Works of Lancaster. Rachel teaches for Messiah University and works at the Hempfield High School Library. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University and currently resides in Lancaster, PA. www.RLStrayerWrites.com

 

Abigail Baia

Abigail Baia has been teaching English and creative writing for thirteen years. She holds her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing: fiction, with a graduate certificate in online writing instruction. Her first book, The Art of Drowning, was a best seller in its category. She is currently revising her second novel, More Than One Way to Breathe, while plotting her third.  Abigail has recently founded a publishing company, Wild Ink Publishing, where she aims to help new authors achieve their first publishing credit. She has coordinated ten literary anthologies, showcasing work from an international group of authors and poets. Abigail is also a literary judge for the NYC Midnight Short Story Competition.

Dr. Sarah Myers - Guest Speaker

Dr. Sarah Myers is an Associate Professor of History at Messiah University. She received her Ph.D. in history from Texas Tech University. Her book, Earning Their Wings: The WASPs of World War II and Their Fight for Veteran Recognition (UNC Press, 2023), explores the 20th century history of women pilots.

She has shared histories of World War II and female veterans with C-SPAN, PBS, the U.S. National Archives, and Gilder Lehrman's Institute of American History. She was interviewed in a documentary aired on PBS entitled Charlotte Mansfield - A Woman Photographer Goes to War. Her writing has been supported by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Aviation Space Writers Foundation Award.

She was awarded a National Endowment of the Humanities Dialogues on the Experience of War grant for a program focused on generating dialogue with female veterans. She led discussion workshops for this grant at the Military Women’s Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. Before her position at Messiah University, she was a museum director, curating museum exhibits and an Oral History Project with Pennsylvania veterans.

She loves interviewing people about their historical experiences and her childhood dream was to write books for a living. She lives with her feisty cat Tailor who, as her name implies, was born without a tail.

She is currently working on 2 books - one on human rights in the Cold War and another on the eugenics movement. Her website is www.sarahparrymyers.com.