Who We Are: The Prose Pros

Located in Humanities 231, the Scripps Writing Center helps writers grow. We give students the chance to work on their writing by engaging in collaborative discussions, offering a comfortable space with tea, snacks, and a snazzy couch.

The Profs

Alongside our amazing peer tutors, the Scripps Writing Center hosts professional staff who work with students on their writing projects.

Adam Novy

Adam Novy lives in an apartment nobody can find. It’s at the far end of a driveway, around a corner, and behind another house. Delivery people have to look on Google Satellite to see it. His cat’s Instagram (Herschel_lacat) has more followers than you, and he’s working on it now, and listening to French pop from the Seventies. For more information on Adam, click here.

Glenn Simshaw

Glenn went into literature and writing partly because as a young child his mom read him nonsense poetry about elephants and telephones. He can roll his tongue but understands this ability doesn’t result from a single dominant gene. He likes big dogs and small dogs who think they’re big dogs. He enjoys chocolate chip cookies but believes Oreos are overrated. His favorite great aunt was among the world’s foremost authorities on antique doorknobs. His favorite novel is Don Quixote. For more information on Glenn, click here.

Pam Bromley

Pam lives in a yellow bungalow with her husband and her dachshund rescue pup. She grew up in Colorado hiking in the mountains, almost always with border collies. She is currently enthralled by the small-scale novels of the should-be-much-better-know Barbara Pym, especially Excellent Women and Quartet in Autumn. She thinks semicolons are vastly underrated. For more information on Pam, click here.

Current Tutors

Isabel Antolin

The Umlaut, the ellipses, sticky rice and soy sauce and Japan…these are some of Isabel’s favorite things. She can often be found in the Claremont Wilderness Park, giving a dramatic reading of Where the Wild Things Are and staking out the animal she thinks should exist: a hummingbird the size of a horse. Here is a joke she likes: What makes a pirate angry? When someone steals their p!

Phoebe Bain

Phoebe is a die-hard fan of the Oxford comma, despite the fact that one of her favorite bands, Vampire Weekend, has a whole song against them. (Phoebe is sure she could change their minds if they visited the Writing Center!) Creative differences aside, she loves finally being on campus and is trying to build up her heat tolerance so that she can go camping in SoCal. In the meantime, she is trying to break her bad habit of hoarding Malott food in the communal fridge, but it’s just so convenient! If she could travel anywhere, it would be to Joshua Tree to go camping: she just really misses getting outside, ok guys? When you stop by the Writing Center, don’t worry if she’s not wearing shoes—that’s just the way to go, baby.

Claire Benjamin

Claire doesn’t know what her favorite book is. In fact, she doesn’t know what her favorite anything is because there are too many wonderful things to choose from! Some of her loves include peanut butter, playing the piano, and rescuing worms off the sidewalk. Seeing an exceptionally cute dog will bring tears to her eyes, as will seeing a spider climbing the wall but for an entirely different reason. She has an embarrassingly large collection of size 8 1/2 5-inch platform shoes and is willing to trade, share, or loan. Also, if anyone can help her remember the joke with the punch line “well well well,” please come by the writing center and let her know!

Tori Eichel

Tori, as a native Californian, is blissfully unaware of the true nature of seasons and would like to keep it that way. On a typical breezy 75-degree day, you’ll find her laying out on one of the many gorgeous Scripps lawns sipping a yerb (Guayaki of course) and snacking on oranges she snatched off a nearby tree. If there is ever a lull in conversation she will talk your ear off about her love of Peach Pit (the band, not like actual peach pits as she prefers nectarines anyway) and insist that she definitely listens to other artists (she doesn’t). Come to the writing center with song recommendations that can get her out of this rut. Just look for the redhead in overalls!

Grace Hill

What Grace lacks in size (she stands at a staggering 5’2”), she makes up for in passion for the presence in life that inspires poetry, ballroom boogie, and warm-fuzzy-kitty-tummies. She is a spicy bilingual meatball that loves to foxtrot to rap music and frequently expresses her enthusiasm and utter perplexity for life using the interrobang (‽). Her essence is most accurately emulated by naughty ponies; she is a rebellious and charming creature with a kick-in-the-pants sense of humor. As with a pony, don’t pull her hair or tease her with snack—she doesn’t like that.

Amie Lee

Amie has a lot of strong opinions, and she’d be happy to share them with you. She’ll list some of them off now. Coleslaw is a plague on society. Ferns are the prettiest houseplant, so she should be able to own them even if she can’t keep them alive. Rectangles are the worst shape. Fusion food is the best genre of food, and we should be able to use the word “genre” interchangeably with “category.” She likes French Onion soup—but only when the bread is crunchy rather than soggy. Those are only a few of her thoughts, but if you come by the writing center, she’ll will be happy to prattle off a few more.

Maya Lozinsky

Maya, who’s from right outside Boston, is ecstatic to be back on campus and is in the process of teaching herself how to do a handstand in her free time. She is a big fan of the oxford comma and prefers tea over coffee. She enjoys bullet journaling and is an enthusiastic advocate of “second dinner” (a post-dinner snack best served around 9:00 p.m.). She would like to visit Machu Picchu in the next two years and hopes to spot a mythical creature at some point. For now, though, she will continue to perfect her British accent and will continue pursuing her dream of seeing a moose in real life.

Clare Martin

Clare prefers her bananas greenish-yellow, but Malott’s fruit doesn’t follow the same rules that other fruit follows, so there she prefers them completely green. Another consumable green thing she likes: Matcha Cha Cha from the Motley, which she pronounced “Mutchachuchus” for a few months before she was corrected. She wants to study abroad in Spain because it seems like a good language to know when you live in the U.S., and certainly not because it’s the setting of the teen drama Élite. She feels comfortable writing about herself, but she feels strange writing about herself in third-person.

Mirabella Miller

Mirabella thinks folklore is Taylor Swift’s best album and Lover is her worst. Her favorite animal is a tie between a deer and a coyote. She likes board games, but you shouldn’t play them with her, she gets too competitive and then it ends up not being very fun for anyone involved. Her favorite book is The Idiot by Elif Batuman. You can find her in Tiernan Field House attempting a yoga pose beyond her abilities or in her room blasting Bruce Springsteen. If you want to distract her during your Writing Center appointment, ask for a book recommendation.

Sofia Muñoz

Sofia also wants you to snack in the Writing Center. She is known to offer food when people visit. Her favorite food is Silpancho, a Bolivian dish with a layer of rice, breaded steak, fried potato rounds, fried eggs, and a tomato and onion salsa, accompanied by a very spicy salsa called “llajua.” She would like to go to Russia and see ballet, but for now, she’s probably at Denison, her favorite place on campus. She speaks four languages, loves the exclamation point, and doesn’t like when people who walk slowly do not let her pass.

Melia Oliver

Melia is a Scorpio Goodreads enthusiast from Berkeley, CA. If that first sentence was enough to make you a bit weary of her, she understands. It’s not as bad as it looks! Melia believes that the em-dash is the most undervalued and underutilized form of punctuation and she simply can’t stand the injustice. Melia has strawberry blonde hair that regularly sparks debate over whether she is blonde or a redhead. If you see a tutor in the writing center with a hair color that looks particularly debatable, that is likely Melia. She is always hearing arguments.

Aidan Trulove

Aidan changes aesthetics nearly every day as determined by a schedule that exists solely within the darkest recesses of her mind. Some of her most iconic outfits (which she willingly wore in public) include a pirate costume (Halloween), head-to-toe denim wrapped in plastic flowers, a vampire costume (not Halloween), and a renaissance-inspired look complete with a butterfly corset she bought for $5. Aidan likes to think that her writing style is just as bold as her fashion sense, and her paragraphs are just as embellished with commas as her shirts are with loose glitter. If you see her in the Writing Center, do not be alarmed; she may be dressed like a vampire/witch/pirate/prince/ghost, but she’s actually very approachable.

Jacqueline Tsai

Jacqueline, although born and raised in Minnesota, cannot stand the cold, and will always pull out her puffer jacket in sub-70-degree weather. Pleasing to her mom, she will always fall victim to a good sale (never buy anything at full price). Writing sarcastic comments in the margins of books is her specialty along with the ability to fall asleep anywhere, including a gym locker-room. Expect to be shown a picture or two of her rat-dogs, Koko and Lulu, during your Writing Center appointment.

Belen Yudess

Belen believes everyone should be a part of at least one fandom. It is the best way to meet friends who are just as emotionally invested in the lives of teenage demigods, Shadowhunters, or -even scarier- high schoolers, who are either blonde, queer, or always miraculously saved from demise at the hands of their long lost relative that no one bothered to mention for 16 years. Belen is still on a quest to convince everyone that Blobfish are the world’s cutest animal, the Glee version is usually better, and Jess was Rory’s best boyfriend on Gilmore Girls. If you ever need someone to fangirl with, know she’s always here for you!

Becoming a Tutor

We hire a select number of new peer tutors each spring for the following academic year. If you like writing, want a job where you can work together with other Scripps students, and like the idea of having chocolate available throughout your shift, consider applying to join us. Prospective tutors are invited to learn more about the Writing Center by exploring this website and visiting the Writing Center itself during regular hours—observing what we do and talking to current tutors. Peer tutors should be strong writers and responsible employees. The ideal tutor leads students to their own answers through active listening and careful questioning. While tutors do not edit papers, they must be able to explain grammar, punctuation, and usage conventions. If you are interested in becoming a Writing Center peer tutor, please contact Writing Center Director Glenn Simshaw.