Mary Alice Trent is currently Professor of English and the Chair of the Division of Modern Language and Literature at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana. She is a former Tenured Professor of English at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the former Chair of the English and Foreign Languages Department and Professor of English at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and is the Founder and Past Chair of the Conference on Christianity, Culture, and Diversity in America. Along with a number of journal articles, poems, and story publications, Dr Trent is the editor of Ethics in the 21st Century America (2005), and co-editor of The Language of Diversity (2007) and Religion, Culture, Curriculum, and Diversity in America (2007). She has presented at more than 70 international, national, and regional professional conferences. She earned her BA in English Education with a General Science Minor and MA in English from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, LA, before receiving her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition Studies with Minors in Linguistics, Early American Literature, and 19th Century British Literature from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.