Writing Center tutor imagines a career, plans to graduate in three years

By Jefferson Beavers, Communication Specialist, Department of English

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At age 2, Dawn Parker wrote her first book, four or five letters per page, ALL UPPERCASE, a series of mostly misspelled words, scrawled across a stack of stapled-together pages.

A couple years later, she entered her zine era, writing a six-part series of homemade books for her little brother as birthday and holiday gifts. The first title: “Merry Christmas, Iron Man.” 

Here’s an invincible synopsis—

All the Avengers have been really busy. But they need to go buy Iron Man a present. So they go on Christmas Eve. And then there is a fight at the store with all the villains and stuff.

Next in the series? An amazing title: “Happy New Year, Spider-Man.”

“I love to go back and look at them. This really silly little children’s story is about my brother’s favorite superheroes,” Parker said. “But this is something that I’ve always loved to do. There was always the creative side of me that just knew I wanted to be a writer, and my parents and brother were always super encouraging.”

Now at Fresno State, Parker has immersed herself in an academic life while at the same time expanding her professional opportunities, finding new circles of peers and imagining new ways to develop her creativity, her research and writing interests and her skills.

After graduating from Laguna Creek High School in Elk Grove, Parker decided in Fall 2022 to come to Fresno State after learning the university offers an undergraduate English degree in creative writing. 

When she attended a Preview Day, Parker enjoyed talking with the English faculty she met, and she fell in love with the campus library. She picked Fresno State over other schools with strong English departments, such as UC Davis and San José State.

Since arriving, Parker’s accomplishments in creative writing have quickly grown. She has published her poems and stories in hais: a literary journal and Elephant Eyes. She served on the editorial board for Spectrum, the annual Young Writers’ Conference publication. And she is a two-time volunteer on the editorial staff of the San Joaquin Review online journal, last year as an assistant editor and this year as Co-Executive Editor.

On March 6, Parker will perform alongside her fellow San Joaquin Review editors as part of the annual Fresno Writers Live shows at the Rogue Festival. 

Parker’s stories and poems focus on experimental forms and themes of family. She enjoys writing sci-fi and fantasy — like she has since she was a kid — but her interests in poetry, literary fiction and visual storytelling are expanding.

“My brother and I are still super close, and I like to explore different sibling relationships in my stories,” she said. “With a lot of my characters, even in the sci-fi realm or the fantasy realm, much of the conflicts and actions are around the family and relationships, and most of my characters have siblings too.”

In 2023, the English Department faculty named Parker the inaugural recipient of the Peter Everwine Memorial Scholarship, in recognition of her educational promise. The scholarship, created in honor of the late poet and Fresno State professor emeritus, was made possible by a pledge gift from Everwine’s son and daughter-in-law, David and Jackie Everwine. 

Parker remembers receiving the Everwine Scholarship notification. She was visiting her parents in Elk Grove, arriving back at the house with her dad after picking him up from work. She jumped up and down after reading the news, cheering in her parents’ garage.

“It meant so much to me in that moment to be recognized for my creative writing because we didn’t have anything like that at my high school,” Parker said. “Majoring in English, there’s always a fear of like, ‘Can I actually do this? Can this actually be a career?’ I thought, yeah, this is definitely what I’m supposed to be doing.”

While she was initially drawn to become a Bulldog by the opportunities of Fresno State’s Creative Writing Program, Parker also discovered another key part of her success on campus: the Writing Center.

In her first semester, Parker enrolled in English 10, a course called Accelerated Academic Literacy. While many students think of this class as “freshman composition,” the objectives of the course cover much more than basic writing, according to Dr. Bo Wang, a professor of English and co-director of the university’s First-Year Writing Program.

“Students’ first-year writing experiences are underrepresented on our campus,” Wang said. “The success of students like Dawn in the first-year writing classroom, and its significance for their growth as writers and scholars, needs to be more visible. These successful students, across disciplines, can be recognized as role models for the current first-year writers.”

In addition to English 10, Parker chose to enroll in English 1L, an optional one-unit tutorial at the Writing Center. In the tutorial course, students meet twice a week in small groups of four, which includes a tutor who leads the group through discussions of their writing assignments and collaborations on how to read critically, give feedback and strategize for revision.

“The biggest factor for me enrolling in the Writing Center was wanting to get more ingrained in the campus because I was very new and I’m also not from Fresno,” Parker said. “So, I thought it would be a good way to sort of meet people.”

She quickly learned that the Writing Center, in combination with her English 10 class, would teach her much more about the process behind all kinds of writing, setting her up for future benefits.

“It seemed like you’re learning the language of what writing is,” Parker said. “I saw it would be way more elevated than just proofreading.”

Later, in her second semester, after the first-year writing course was complete, Parker returned to the Writing Center for some one-on-one help with a paper. During a walk-in session, the tutor she was working with remembered her from the tutorial. He mentioned that tutor applications were open, and he encouraged Parker to apply. 

“I wanted to work on campus because I live on campus,” Parker said. “But my friends would always send me their papers and be like, ‘Hey, help me with this,’ so I would make the joke that I kind of became the study guide for my friends and classmates. I realized I had a lot of experience helping people unofficially, so I thought I would be good at doing it in an actual professional environment.”

Last year, in her third and fourth semesters, Parker dove into being a tutor. She especially enjoyed leading tutees through a series of useful strategies for brainstorming their assignments, especially “mind mapping,” where a writer puts down on paper the topic they want to talk about, and then branches out all the different ideas that could be connected to the topic.

This year, in her fifth and sixth semesters, Parker was promoted to being a Writing Center tutor supervisor. In addition to tutoring, she manages the center’s databases. She prepares and analyzes usage reports from tutors and tutees alike, which leads to data-informed upgrades to what tutoring techniques are emphasized and how the center’s resources are used.

Courtney Hughes, a lecturer in the English Department who co-directs the Writing Center, said Parker shows a commitment to excellence that makes the center better, pushing conversations about new concepts and problems deeper.

“Dawn provides an excellent example of a learner,” Hughes said. “She often models our strategies to other tutors, and she takes on the role of the tutee in mock sessions. She is approachable, partially because she was once a tutee and can represent the feelings of that experience. But mostly, it is her constant willingness to help that makes her colleagues go to her when they need advice.”

Parker has made the President’s List five times in a row. She is on track to graduate in May, completing her bachelor’s degree in just three years.

Pushing herself to get involved in campus life and try lots of new things within her major while challenging herself to try and graduate in three years has taught Parker to not only lean into a “Just Do It” mentality — a vibe that is totally worthy of a superhero — but also to trust her intuition about where she wants her studies to take her.

After graduation, she hopes to pursue work in the publishing industry, to find the chance to continue to impact the work of other writers.

“Being here, and going through all these different experiences in different communities, it has shown me that I can do this. I can see myself thriving,” Parker said. “I want to be a publisher, I want to be an editor, I want to help other people with their work, and I want to get my own writing published.”