She has served as chair of the English department from 2006-2009 and was instrumental in re-formulating the curriculum. Gender, ethnicity, poetry and dance are recurring themes in her various guest lectures and published articles. As an engaged professor, she teaches the craft of writing to undergraduates every year in her classes and fosters a sense of why good writing is important, through classes that are designed to be both fun and challenging. Believing that the spoken word is as important as the written word, she is a performance poet who performs at many venues in Hawaii. She also is the facilitator for Aulama, Chaminade University’s student literary journal. Her chapter on black female writers in the 19th century marketplace will appear in the upcoming literary anthology, Imag(in)ing America: The Black Body in Literature.