Congratulations to Amber Caron, Recipient of the English Faculty Mentoring Award

Assistant Professor Amber Caron is one of the two recipients of the 2026 English Faculty Mentoring Award. Our English Faculty Mentoring Award was established by generous donors who themselves benefited from the encouragement of supportive faculty at pivotal moments of their undergraduate careers. This $2,500 award recognizes English Department faculty who have gone above and beyond in mentoring students.

Since arriving at USU as an adjunct instructor in 2019, Amber has made meaningful, individual mentorship a priority. In just seven years, she has personally mentored eight undergraduate students and twelve graduate students on significant projects, such as theses, conference presentations, and Honors capstones. She also earned the 2024-2025 English Department Undergraduate Research Mentor of the Year Award and the 2021 PEN America L’Engle-Rahman Prize for Mentorship.

For Amber, mentoring students is about letting their individual interests and pursuits guide the way she approaches advising. She pays attention to the work they do, personally understanding her students and their writing to the point that she can approach them with opportunities. For example, last semester, professors in the USU Climate Adaptation Science program reached out to see if Amber knew of students who would be interested in writing short environmental fiction pieces to accompany data on their students’ research sites showcasing the current and potential effects of climate change. Amber was quickly able to reach out to four graduate and two undergraduate students who she knew were interested in the intersection of art and the environment. All six students were then connected with rich professional development experiences in their field of interest thanks to Amber’s knowledge of their work. 

This deep understanding of her students’ interests and creative works allows Amber to refine her guidance to the needs of each individual student. She consistently helps students revise the work they wrote in her courses beyond the limits of the semester. She encourages students to apply for grants, scholarships, conferences, and publications and helps during each step of the process. Amber comments, “the time, patience, and energy required to mentor students in a way that provides deeply meaningful and lasting experiences is worth the effort.”

Amber acknowledges that mentoring isn’t always easy; the creative process can be challenging, administrative hurdles can feel overwhelming, and receiving rejections, especially for writers putting out their work for the first time, can be hard to bounce back from. However, Amber continues to show her students that she is a source of support through those difficulties. She says, “This, I believe, is another responsibility of a mentor — not to solve every problem a student has but to show them how to navigate these challenging moments.”

The English Department is deeply grateful to the donors who have made this award possible and to all the many friends and alumni who encourage the wonderful work of our faculty and students.