When I think of books, I immediately think of Mia Nelson. I took an English class with her during our senior year at Dartmouth and the way she talked about books and literature made me want to live in her mind and read everything with her. This conversation was nothing different.

Mia has always loved reading. In high school she attended a creative writing program that naturally led to her English and creative writing major at Dartmouth. After graduation she went to Spain to teach English as a Fulbright scholar at a community college. She spent a year in Galicia, an autonomous community in northwestern Spain, where students learned English via other academic subjects. Students would talk about a subject of familiarity or interest, such as marketing or tourism training, in English. The focus was to communicate rather than learning English the “correct” way—ideally creating an environment where more students felt curious and creative in their language studies.

Mia thinks ENGS 12: Design Thinking at Dartmouth made her a better writer and teacher, and she still remembers a quote from the class that “creativity is something you do, it doesn’t just happen to you.” As for creative teaching, it has become clearer that she is good at teaching because she is good at being a “beginner” with endless curiosity and eagerness.

After a year abroad Mia was glad to return to the East Coast and a community that shares her love for words. She is currently enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Vermont (UVM), where she takes two classes and teaches two classes during her first year. She loves that she can be equally invested in being a professor for 66 freshmen and continue learning as a student. One of her classes is a foundational composition course where students learn to write academically, which means she now has to balance her position of authority with past teaching experience that focused more on co-creation or peer teaching.

Being the first English professor for a lot of her students has allowed her to be a part of other people’s academic story while creating her own. She has always loved contemporary literature and thinks that institutions don’t give enough credence to the genre that reflects upon the present moment. As an undergrad Mia wrote a thesis on ecological girlhood—how girls are fixated as protagonists in fictional environmental apocalypses such as The Hunger Games. She looked at a Jesmyn Ward novel and a Lydia Millet novel to find out what it means to be a girl at the end of the world and what that means for the environment. At UVM she took a class called Frankenstein in Climate Change, which applies contemporary reading theory to examine Frankenstein as the “first climate change novel.” She really enjoyed that reading practice and is inspired to revisit Frankenstein and Louise Glück’s Nobel Prize-winning poetry and examine how these narratives link together climate change and sexuality for her master’s thesis.

Mia is always reading and will always have a list of recommendations. She had just finished Come and Get It by Kiley Reid, a book about academia that reflects on privilege and neoliberalism, and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, which tackles the opioid crisis and talks about the environment. Mia has always gravitated toward fiction as the stories create an inventive distance, but she recently loved Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller, a nonfiction book about the author’s quest to find meaning in the world through her obsession with one of the world’s most flawed and prolific taxonomists.

Try asking her for recommendations, and I’m sure she will give you five different books every time you ask.

—Louisa Gao, 279 E 44th St, Apt 3L, New York, NY 10017; louisa.gao0922@gmail.com