Katie Manning, Ph.D. (05) is an accomplished professor here at PLNU who followed the path back to Loma after graduating in 2005.
Manning was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona but has been familiar with the Point Loma area for a long time. As a child, she was a participant in the Bible Quizzing ministry, and the bible quiz competitions she was involved in took place on the PLNU main campus.
As a student in middle and high school, she was very involved in musical theater and always imagined she would major in musical theater in college. However, after interviewing a friend’s mother who was an actress, she quickly realized that this was not the job for her because of the lack of stability.
“I love singing and music, but it was not the thing that I loved when it became work,” Manning said. “You have to pick the thing you still like when it becomes work.”
Having applied to many different schools like NYU and even being accepted into USC’s theater program, Manning had a difficult choice to make as college loomed closer and closer. During the February of her senior year, she had been praying about college and felt an overwhelming peace about going to PLNU — a clarity which was also affirmed after receiving a scholarship.
“I had been praying a lot about my college decision because it is such a scary and important thing,” Manning said. “One Sunday night, I was praying about it and I just felt this sudden overwhelming peace about going to Loma. It’s one of those moments that I can’t totally explain, but it’s one of those moments when I felt a lot of clarity about what would be best for me.”
Manning started as a Journalism major at PLNU, but once again had the feeling that it was not what she wanted for her career. At the same time, she was also taking British Writers II with literature professor Bettina Pederson, Ph.D. and became very drawn to literature. She then switched her major to literature and added a minor in women’s studies, with which she graduated in 2005. Alongside her literature pursuits, Manning was also involved in the music department as a member of the Concert and Jazz Choirs and Point Loma Singers.
Manning was admitted into the Honors Program, which requires students to plan and create an honors project their senior year. For this project, she chose to focus on creative writing and put together a collection of poetry entitled She Speaks: Voices of Women in a Variety of Poetic Forms. Manning tackled this project by writing in the voice of several different women in order to highlight the experiences of women.
As a tutor in the writing center, she really enjoyed helping students one-on-one, but came to enjoy teaching group workshops much more. Because of this passion for group instruction, her academic advisor encouraged her to think about becoming a professor, and during her junior year, Manning decided she wanted to be a professor.
“Around my junior year, I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I want to be a professor.’ Coming back here was my dream job.”
“I loved [tutoring], and around my junior year, I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I want to be a professor.’ Coming back here was my dream job.”
One of the highlights of college for Manning, however, was outside academia. Before her senior year, Manning married her college sweetheart after three years of dating. Manning and her husband, Jon, got to live in on-campus married housing where they hosted dinners and game nights for their friends.
“One of my favorite things was that Jon and I got to live in married housing our senior year of college because at the time, they had a few Flex apartments set aside for married couples,” Manning said. “It was so fun to still be on campus and to be so close to our friends.”
After graduating from Point Loma, Manning went on to get her Master of Arts in English with a creative writing concentration at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.
Following the completion of this degree, Manning received a call from literature professor Karl Martin, P.h.D, who told her that the current poetry professor at PLNU was retiring and they wanted to offer her a visiting position. Manning accepted this position which would last a year while she was looking at Ph.D. programs. She ended up back at Point Loma just three years after graduation, teaching with her former professors.
“It was fun, it was so fun,” Manning said. “They just treated me so well and I felt so cared for. I think that was one of the best years of my life.”
After the year of her visiting position, Manning moved on to Louisiana to complete her Ph.D. at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Manning ended up back in California when she accepted a teaching position at Azusa Pacific University, where she taught for three years.
After Manning earned her Ph.D., a position opened up at Loma, which she jumped at. She is now back in the position she always imagined herself in, working with some of her former professors — and could not be happier about it. Her husband, Jon, also teaches at PLNU as a professor of theology and the director of the LEAP program.
Manning is currently teaching a literary workshop and Introduction to Creative Writing for undergraduates, along with an Editing and Publishing class and Poetry Workshop for graduate students in the Writing M.A. program — working fairly evenly with undergraduate and graduate students.
Her position also includes being the chair of various honors projects committees, which has always brought her so much joy.
As a poet, Manning is widely published and successful. She won the Main Street Rag book Award in 2016 for her first full-length book, Tasty Other, which explores the joys and fears of motherhood through the retelling of fairy tales and reflections on Manning’s dreams before giving birth.
“It’s so affirming because that was my first full length book,” Manning said. “And at some point, I told my husband, Jon, that I just wanted one thing. I wanted one prize and then I’ll say I’m satisfied with that. So it was really nice when that happened and I didn’t feel that pressure anymore.”
Manning was also the runner up for the Desert Rat Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Lascaux Poetry Prize. Along with these honors, one of Manning’s poems was also featured on her favorite podcast, “Poetry Unbound.” Manning has released eight collections of poems, including Hereverent, How to Play: Poems Inspired by Games, and 28,065 Nights. These collections of poems along with her other publications focus on subjects from womanhood to the weaponization of the Bible to board game inspirations.
In summer 2024, Manning and a group of her writing friends did a week-long workshop in Santa Fe. She brought all of her poems that weren’t currently in a manuscript, starting with a poem engaging with Charles Darwin, faith, and loss.
After her parents-in-law tragically passed away in a car accident, Manning found a book about Darwin among her father-in-law’s books on theology and religion. This book was what allowed her to start writing through intense grief. Engaging with medical facts and science became more comforting to her than anything else.
“I started writing other poems that were leaning into medical facts or other scientific details,” Manning said, “because those were comforting to me as I was navigating grief.”
Manning continued to lean into this engagement with science and medical facts when her husband, Jon, developed cancer about eight months after they lost his parents. Struggling through more grief, Manning wrote prolifically about sadness through the dual perspective of both faith and science. Manning’s husband is, thankfully, now cancer-free.
Manning expressed that she is passionate about writing poetry about a variety of topics — responses to Biblical stories, fairy tales, and other existing stories being just a few. However, Manning has recently been drawn to writing about her children through her experience with motherhood, something that gets a little more complicated as her children get older. She struggles with deciding what to share with others, as her poems are often very personal to her children’s lives.
“I always say you should write everything you need to write and it doesn’t mean you have to share it all. It’s okay to have a folder of things you might not ever share with other people.”
“I always say you should write everything you need to write and it doesn’t mean you have to share it all,” Manning said. “It’s okay to have a folder of things you might not ever share with other people.”
Drawing from her own life experiences, Manning is also extremely inspired by the lives and struggles of women and is drawn to the idea of amplifying voices that are rarely heard. Her collection of poetry, The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman, imagines a life for an unnamed woman of the Bible: the bleeding woman that touches Jesus in order to be healed, whose story is told in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is just one example of how Manning uses her platform in order to emphasize the voices of women that would otherwise go unnoticed, an empowering and never-ending task.
