The English Aggie

Katie Satterlee is a senior English major with minors in communication and journalism at Texas A&M University. She enjoys playing tennis, reading romance novels, and creating new products for her small business. Katie’s Kreations began when Katie sold bracelets out of her locker in high school for only a dollar. Her older sister, Jaden, was one of her first customers. While Katie didn’t make much of a profit, the experience gave her the confidence she needed in order to open a booth at Bryan First Fridays and expand Katie’s Kreations into the business it is today.  Katie first heard of Bryan First Fridays two years ago in March 2021. She was invited by a friend and instantly fell in love with the creative booths lining the streets of Downtown Bryan. Before this, she “had no idea there was a way to sell [her] creations within a welcoming community of fellow creators and the kindest customers [she] could possibly ask for.” Katie began her own booth the following month. While it w...

Please introduce yourself! Where are you from? What are you interested in outside of English?  Howdy! My name is Riley Womack (’19), I am originally from Beaumont, Texas (on the gulf coast, close to the border with Louisiana), and I’m a current MFA candidate in Columbia University’s Writing Program (fiction concentration).  Outside of my English studies, I’ve always harbored a deep appreciation for history (I was nearly a history major at A&M) and I think that has seeped into my writing in myriad ways, namely when examining certain practices of American mythmaking and how it has affected our culture. My parents—both, shall we say, former musicians who both studied music in college—bestowed a deep love of music onto me, and so I have always loved music and the other performance arts. I played the trombone up until my graduation from A&M (I was in one of the university’s jazz bands) and, while my horn is collecting dust in a closet back home, I still love music and take...

  Pictured above: Members of the CWTC gathered in Evans Annex 239 for their weekly meeting. Join them Wednesday nights from 7:30-8:30, and follow their Instagram account @cwrtctamu for updates on meetings and other events.  Q: It’s interesting that an engineer is leading a creative writing club. What made you decide to do so, and where does your interest in creative writing come from? Dillan: A creative thought process is essential to being a good engineer. I have had to reinvent how I approach the engineering design process through my mechanical engineering journey at Texas A&M countless times. And I wouldn’t have been able to do that as effectively without a proper creative outlet in which I could familiarize myself with how I ideate and better my ideas. My passion for writing in particular started when I joined my high school writing club and eventually became the president of it. When I joined the Creative Writing Techniques Club (CWTC) at Texas A&M my freshman yea...

Kayla Wilford graduated from Texas A&M University in December 2021 with a degree in English. Since then, she has been exploring the many avenues available to her as a recent graduate, including working in education, theater, freelance editing, and college advising. While Kayla was proud to graduate, she explained that it was also “bittersweet…because College Station became [her] home away from home very quickly.” Leaving the familiarity of campus, her college friends, and A&M’s supportive professors was a difficult but necessary step. She appreciated Dr. Elizabeth Robinson in particular, as she “loved learning from her and being able to ask for help with post school questions I had or just advice in general.” Armed with knowledge and access to helpful resources, Kayla went forward into the world feeling completely prepared for whatever would come next. After graduation, Kayla first began working as a substitute teacher in Fort Worth, Texas. She discovered what it was like to b...

Presley Graves is a senior English major at Texas A&M University, and she recently had the opportunity to study with Cornell Law students at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She first heard about the program in an email from her academic advisor, Sarah Borden. Presley expressed her interest to her advisor and to Dr. Vasilakis, and they both encouraged and supported her through the application process. Presley spent four weeks in Paris learning alongside graduate and undergraduate students from Cornell University. The program began with introductory lectures and tours of the university and many cultural experiences in Paris. She toured museums and churches, drank hot chocolate at the Angelina, visited Versailles, and saw the Palais Garnier Opera House. As a huge fan of The Phantom of the Opera , Presley was thrilled to see the place the novel was based on. Of course, she also visited the Eiffel Tower. Her group actually visited on Bastille Day, so she was able to see fireworks shooting...

On April 5th, Stark Gallery was full of Texas A&M University students celebrating their Asian-American heritage and their many accomplishments over the course of the school year. The Institute for the Development of Asian American Leaders, or IDEAAL, was hosting their annual capstone art gallery. IDEAAL is a student-led organization that has been a part of Texas A&M’s multicultural services for nearly twenty years. Taran Rao, director of this year’s art gallery, explained that IDEAAL was “designed to be a safe space and support system for [Asian American freshmen] students as they expand on their own perception of their identity.” The organization consisted of biweekly workshops with guest speakers, leadership trainings, written reflections, and one-on-one mentorship. To conclude the spring semester, IDEAAL hosted an art gallery that allowed its freshmen students to showcase work that answered the question of “Who Am I?”. Students completed works that ranged from paintings to p...

Dr. Jason Harris, Dr. Nandini Bhattacharya, and Dr. Emily Johansen have been hard at work. In the past year, these three faculty members have all published books. Dr. Harris published Master of Rods and Strings, a horror novella about occult puppetry. Dr. Bhattacharya’s novel, Love’s Garden, is a historical novel set in both modern-day India and British-ruled India. Lastly, Beyond Safety by Emily Johansen is a scholarly nonfiction discussing risk and safety in everyday life.  Dr. Harris teaches creative writing and folklore as a Creative Writing Coordinator for the English department. He grew up in California, but he has lived in many other states, including Florida, Ohio, and now Texas. He’s enjoyed writing from a young age—from stories of talking slugs using spelling test words to junior high writing conferences—and studied prose and poetry each quarter as a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In 2001, he graduated with a PhD in English Literature. After a ...