Gary Phillips

Cherokee Nation member Paul Gary Phillips—more typically known as "Gary Phillips"— completed his San Diego State College bachelor’s degree in 1968 then continued on to SDSC’s graduate program in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. His appreciation for plots, character motives, and story development lead to his novel, Homeward Bound. The novel also served as Phillips’s creative thesis, which he submitted in 1974 to complete the requirements for his Master’s degree in English.

In 1988, Gary’s wife, Joyce B. Phillips entered a classified employment position in the college’s Writing Center as a tutor training specialist; four years later, Gary Phillips would, himself, be teaching part-time for the Grossmont College English Department. Over the next few years, Joyce took point as supervisor of the English Writing Center, and in 1995 Gary Phillips was invited by then Chair Mary Donnelly to join the full-time teaching staff of the English Department. In addition to emphasizing remedial skills programs, Phillips conducted introductory Creative Writing classes for years until chartering in fall of 2005 a new four-course workshop sequence for the Department’s Creative Writing Program, Novel Writing, which would remain his signature course for the remainder of his teaching time at Grossmont.

Recalled fondly for his signature Stetson hats, Gary also stepped into administrative duties in 1999, succeeding Mary Donnelly as Department head. During his tenure as Chair, Phillips served on the Academic Senate and, within his Department, helped to expand Mary Donnelly and Sue Jensen’s Project Success. Additionally, he presided over one of the English Department’s greatest expansions of faculty since Charline Lamons’s hiring campaign during the mid to late 1960s: thirteen new faculty members in all between 2000 and 2006, many of them adjunct instructors who had already been working decades for the District.

Joyce B. Phillips and Gary Phillips, co-authors of Essentials of Tutoring, 2004

In 1998, he and wife Joyce co-authored The Brainerd Journal, a chronicle of early nineteenth century interdenominational mission work in Cherokee territory near present-day Chattanooga. Six years later, working again as a successful writing partnership, the Phillipses parlayed Joyce's research into tutor training, along with Gary's experience expanding the English Writing Center's remedial skills, into the Wadsworth textbook, Essentials of Tutoring: Helping College Students Develop Their Writing Skills, which was soon after included as a supplement in Houghflin Mifflin's Aimes’ Keys For Writers. That same year, in recognition of Joyce Phillips's achievements leading the English Writing Center and co-authoring the textbook, she received an Outstanding Classified Staff Award, and, at the end of the 2006-2007 academic year, Gary Phillips, himself, was awarded the title of Distinguished Faculty.

Following this period of success, Gary Phillips passed the Stetson of Department Chair to Dr. Oralee Holder but continued to teach basic skills courses and Novel Writing, as well as collaborate with colleague Linda Mitchell in her Fantasy and Science Fiction literature class. At the end of the 2011 school year, however, he and wife, Joyce, retired together, remaining in the El Cajon area.

• Thank you to Gary Phillips for helping with the correction and addition of details to his biography, as well as consenting to the breadth of content that initially resulted from my research. In fact, Gary continued to assist with this project in his retirement, periodically sending me information and edits to improve the data presented on these pages, for which I've always been very grateful. As a side note, I also owe a debt of gratitude to Gary Phillips for working to bring me on staff at Grossmont in 2006, and for the years before and after that we harmoniously shared office 558. To have had a Department Chair as my office partner and for that colleague to have been Gary Phillips, I will always consider that such bon chance. Thank you, my friend!

• Homeward Bound (A Novel). Thesis, M.A, English. San Diego, CA: San Diego State University, 1974. 338 pages.

Co-Authored/Co-Edited with Joyce B. Phillips

• The Brainerd Journal: A Mission to the Cherokees, 1817-1823. University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

• Essentials of Tutoring: Helping College Students Develop Their Writing Skills. Wadsworth, 2004.
• "Essentials of Tutoring: Helping College Students Develop Their Writing Skills." in Raimes's Keys For Writers. 4th edition. Ed. Ann Raimes.Houghton Mifflin College Division, 2004.

• Centaur Yearbook, Class of 1964. San Diego, CA: Crawford High School, 1964.
• Document Collections and Photographic Archives of the Grossmont College English Department. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District.
• Grossmont College Institutional Archives. Learning Resource Center. Grossmont College, Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District.
• “Joyce and Gary Phillips Author Essentials of Tutoring.” Campus Scene (Grossmont College, El Cajon, CA) Vol 5, No. 5 (August/September 1995): p1. Web.
• Del Sudoesto Yearbook. San Diego, CA: San Diego State College, 1965, 1966.
• "Phillips, Gary." The Gallery: A 35th Anniversary Photographic Directory of the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community Faculty, Administration, and Staff. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District, 1996. p104.
• Private Photo Collection. Copyright, Homer B. Lusk, Grossmont College Professor Emeritus and former English Department Chair.
• Valentine, Kathryn. "The Undercurrents of Listening: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Listening in Writing Center Tutor Guidebooks." The Writing Center Journal Vol. 36, No. 2 (2017): p89-115.

• Chuck Passentino 1995-2006* (*tenured to ESL 2006- )
• Paul "Gary" Phillips 1995-2011 (Chair 1999-2006)
• Marilyn (Estep) Ivanovichi 1999-2011
• Linda (Differding) Mitchell 1997-2013
• Anthony Ding 1999-2017