With over 13 years of editorial experience, Dr. Deborah Poe was the ideal candidate for Pace University when searching for a Faculty Advisory Editor for Vox Arts and Literary Magazine. In addition to teaching, Vox added a creative outlet that Poe brought to the students at Pace.

“[When I started on the Vox staff], it looked very, very different,” said Poe, who received her undergraduate degree in English with minors in Marketing and French from Texas A&M. “It looked more like a yearbook and fashion magazine combined than a literary magazine. We decided to take it in a new direction. I help students bring the magazine to life, but the students are the ones who run the magazine.”

Poe first started teaching at Pace in the fall of 2008

“I feel very fortunate all the time because that was the fall that the economy tanked. I had lots of friends who were called in for job searches and those searches were canceled because people didn’t have the funds anymore,” Poe said.

Prior to her time at Pace, Poe worked for Microsoft as an editor for its programming management field. Between the 1999 and 2002, she traveled around the world making the content for Microsoft websites. However, the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 prompted a new direction for Poe.

“I decided that life was too short, and I applied to Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington for their Masters of Arts and English,” Poe said. “During my time there, I was also volunteering for Richard Hugo House in Seattle and editing for other magazines in the area,” Poe said.

Halfway through her time in Washington, Poe realized that she needed more education and began applying for Doctoral programs.

“I got into the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. I also got into the University of Binghamton at SUNY, which offered me funding to be a teacher while I was getting my doctorate, so I decided to come to the east coast,” Poe said.

Since being at Pace, Poe has published four books. 2008 birthed the first of three poetry collections, Our Parenthetical Ontology. In 2010 Elements was pubslished and then her 2012 novella, Hélèle. and one co-edited book of fiction criticism create her current pile of literary works. Between Worlds: An Anthology of Fiction and Criticism, co-edited with Ama Wattley was published in 2012 and her most current poetry collection, a close meditation on death, is in the works.

“A lot has happened since I’ve been at Pace, and for me, writing is a friend,” Poe said. “I’ve said to people that my babies are my poems and stories because I don’t have children. Life can be very difficult or lonely or hard and can be filled with challenges, and writing really helps me negotiate human experience and to connect with other human beings throughout literature in the world,” Poe said.

To Poe, writing has turned her life into a more “wondrous place,” in which she makes sense of human interactions extending to the community through her work.

“There is so much going on in the world, with you and your peers, and reading veraciously make our persons so unique.”