Dr. Ogden spent her early childhood in Honolulu, Hawai'i before moving to the Bay Area. She's spent almost every summer of her life traveling to southeast Louisiana where her paternal family resides. She earned her Associate Arts degree from Skyline Community College, and completed her Bachelor of Arts degree from San Francisco State University with an interdisciplinary major in English, Creative Writing, Theater, and Psychology, with a special concentration in African and African American Diaspora. Her Master of Fine Arts degree is in Creative Writing and American Literature, which she earned from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Her MFA thesis was a mixed-genre novel, Earthquake Weather. Dr. Ogden's Phd is in Theater History, Literature, and Dramatic Criticism from Louisiana State University with a special concentration in Women & Gender Studies and focused course work in Playwriting, Serbian-Croatian Literature & Performance, Solo-Performance, Indigenous drama (including the African diaspora and the work of Wole Soyinka), and early American drama under Billy J. Harbin. Her dissertation was directed by Les Wade and focuses on Hawaiian American Identities through an examination of plays and performance by Native Hawaiian and Local Hawaiian writers.
As a composition and creative writing specialist, Dr. Ogden focuses on helping students develop a foundational set of writing skills from which they can write personal, professional, and academic prose for a variety of audiences and purposes. Her primary goal is to guide students in the development of what she calls their "authentic" voice using Peter Elbow's freewriting pedagogy as a foundational practice. Dr. Ogden works from an historiographical and genre-less foundation, inviting students to locate themselves in the context of what they're reading and composing. Many of Dr. Ogden's former students have gone on to publish or present their literary and creative compositions at student conferences and in regional and national literary journals, with small presses, as well as attending MFA and Phd programs in Creative Writing and allied fields.
Dr. Ogden is an alumna of the San Francisco American Conservatory Theater Academy, Writer's Boot Camp and Actor's Bootcamp in Los Angeles. As a writer, director, essayist, poet, performance-writer and teacher, Dr. Ogden often develops cross-disciplinary projects that bridge her creative and scholarly pursuits. Her work has appeared in national literary journals, and her plays and performance adaptations have been staged at many university and community venues. She's studied solo performance in workshops with Dan Kwong and Denise Uyehara, and Meisner technique at the Los Angeles Actor's Boot Camp. She is an alumna of Teach for America and has worked as a Curriculum Specialist and Corps Member Advisor at TFA Summer Training Institutes for new teachers. Professor Ogden additionally works with the Kenyon Review Young Writers program each summer in Gambier, Ohio where she has served as Gambier's poet laureate and was named a Peter Taylor Poetry Fellow for the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. She has served as 2-time judge for the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Prize under award-winning author Nancy Zafris.
Prior to her tenure at Pasadena City College, Dr. Ogden was Director of Writing Programs at the University of La Verne. While there, she served as editor and transitioned the student literary publication, Prism, into the nationally-respected literary journal, Prism Review. Additionally, she developed the core curriculum for an interdisciplinary BA in Creative Writing, and redesigned the basic skills program at ULV to focus on acceleration and open enrollment. Working with the ULV Honors Program, Dr. Ogden developed several interdisciplinary, co-taught courses, including American Vernacular and Music Journalism, and she collaborated with faculty on the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies BA, developing an international scholar and artists conference that ran for 3 consecutive years on the campus.
Dr. Ogden believes deeply in educational equity and social justice. As a working-class kid and the first person in her family to attend and graduate from college, Dr. Ogden experienced the challenges and difficulties that many of today's working community college students face. It was her own experiences as a student at Skyline Community College that encouraged her application to Pasadena City College. In her time at PCC, Dr. Ogden has served on the General Education Outcomes Faculty Committee, helped to develop and pilot the early curriculum for PCC's award-winning College 1-Pathways program, co-spearheaded the English Division's distance education program with fellow colleagues, completed training in Reading Apprenticeship, co-chaired the development of the Stretch-Accelerated Composition program curriculum (STACC) which was an early pioneer of open-enrollment acceleration, and most recently she has graduated from the WASC - Assessment Leadership Academy, using those skills at PCC as Faculty Assessment Coach. Dr. Ogden has recently been working as a Faculty Lead in the English Division.
As a life-long learner, Dr. Ogden currently attends CSULA in the pursuit of an additional Masters degree to enhance her expertise in LGBTQ+ literatures, the Public Humanities, and 21st Century Composition & Rhetoric. While at CSULA Dr. Ogden was awarded the AWP Henri Coulette Poetry Prize and was awarded a poetry fellowship to China by the Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.
Dr. Ogden is a proponent of mindfulness in the classroom, and is an avid Bikram Yoga practitioner.
As a composition and creative writing specialist, Dr. Ogden focuses on helping students develop a foundational set of writing skills from which they can write personal, professional, and academic prose for a variety of audiences and purposes. Her primary goal is to guide students in the development of what she calls their "authentic" voice using Peter Elbow's freewriting pedagogy as a foundational practice. Dr. Ogden works from an historiographical and genre-less foundation, inviting students to locate themselves in the context of what they're reading and composing. Many of Dr. Ogden's former students have gone on to publish or present their literary and creative compositions at student conferences and in regional and national literary journals, with small presses, as well as attending MFA and Phd programs in Creative Writing and allied fields.
Dr. Ogden is an alumna of the San Francisco American Conservatory Theater Academy, Writer's Boot Camp and Actor's Bootcamp in Los Angeles. As a writer, director, essayist, poet, performance-writer and teacher, Dr. Ogden often develops cross-disciplinary projects that bridge her creative and scholarly pursuits. Her work has appeared in national literary journals, and her plays and performance adaptations have been staged at many university and community venues. She's studied solo performance in workshops with Dan Kwong and Denise Uyehara, and Meisner technique at the Los Angeles Actor's Boot Camp. She is an alumna of Teach for America and has worked as a Curriculum Specialist and Corps Member Advisor at TFA Summer Training Institutes for new teachers. Professor Ogden additionally works with the Kenyon Review Young Writers program each summer in Gambier, Ohio where she has served as Gambier's poet laureate and was named a Peter Taylor Poetry Fellow for the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. She has served as 2-time judge for the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Prize under award-winning author Nancy Zafris.
Prior to her tenure at Pasadena City College, Dr. Ogden was Director of Writing Programs at the University of La Verne. While there, she served as editor and transitioned the student literary publication, Prism, into the nationally-respected literary journal, Prism Review. Additionally, she developed the core curriculum for an interdisciplinary BA in Creative Writing, and redesigned the basic skills program at ULV to focus on acceleration and open enrollment. Working with the ULV Honors Program, Dr. Ogden developed several interdisciplinary, co-taught courses, including American Vernacular and Music Journalism, and she collaborated with faculty on the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies BA, developing an international scholar and artists conference that ran for 3 consecutive years on the campus.
Dr. Ogden believes deeply in educational equity and social justice. As a working-class kid and the first person in her family to attend and graduate from college, Dr. Ogden experienced the challenges and difficulties that many of today's working community college students face. It was her own experiences as a student at Skyline Community College that encouraged her application to Pasadena City College. In her time at PCC, Dr. Ogden has served on the General Education Outcomes Faculty Committee, helped to develop and pilot the early curriculum for PCC's award-winning College 1-Pathways program, co-spearheaded the English Division's distance education program with fellow colleagues, completed training in Reading Apprenticeship, co-chaired the development of the Stretch-Accelerated Composition program curriculum (STACC) which was an early pioneer of open-enrollment acceleration, and most recently she has graduated from the WASC - Assessment Leadership Academy, using those skills at PCC as Faculty Assessment Coach. Dr. Ogden has recently been working as a Faculty Lead in the English Division.
As a life-long learner, Dr. Ogden currently attends CSULA in the pursuit of an additional Masters degree to enhance her expertise in LGBTQ+ literatures, the Public Humanities, and 21st Century Composition & Rhetoric. While at CSULA Dr. Ogden was awarded the AWP Henri Coulette Poetry Prize and was awarded a poetry fellowship to China by the Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.
Dr. Ogden is a proponent of mindfulness in the classroom, and is an avid Bikram Yoga practitioner.
