I’m Interim Director of Teaching Effectiveness for the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Online Education (CETLOE) and an associate professor of English in the Rhetoric and Composition concentration at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in composition theory and pedagogy, research methods, public and visual rhetoric, writing program administration, and digital writing and production. I directed the Writing Across the Curriculum program at GSU from 2018 – 2023. 

My recent publications and research projects explore student writing beyond the university, best practices for writing programs, and teaching writing for social change. My first book Public Pedagogy in Composition Studies was published through the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Studies in Writing and Rhetoric Series in 2016. I have also published peer-reviewed essays in College English, Composition Forum,English Journal, Community Literacy Journal, Reflections, Kairos, and Ubiquity, as well as several edited collections. I am currently managing co-editor of Composition Forum (since 2020), and I am serving on the Research and Publications committee with the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum (AWAC).

I have two books under contract and forthcoming in 2023. In my monograph Learning on Location: Place-Based Education for Diverse Learners (under contract with Stylus / Elon University Center for Engaged Learning), I make the case that the communities we come from, the spaces we now dwell in, and the streets we move through each day are vitally important to teaching and learning in higher education, both for us as faculty and for our students as learners. As described in the book, I assign students in my classes to “learn on location” as a way of inviting them to critically engage with public space, confront their assumptions about people in their community, and reflect on what we learn about ourselves and others through experiential learning. Building on a first chapter that provides a framework for learning on location, the book is organized around three place-based practices: writing on location, walking on location, and engaging the civic on location. I argue that learning on location opens opportunities for newly inspired content, wonderfully unpredictable experiences, and deeper levels of engagement with real world issues.

Also expected to be published later in 2023 is Learning from the Mess: Method/ological Praxis in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, a collection I am co-editing with Elise Verzosa Hurley (under contract with the WAC Clearinghouse).

Prior to starting at GSU in August 2012, I graduated with my Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English from the University of Arizona. After earning my B.A. and M.A. in English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, I worked for three years as a lecturer in the English Department at Elon University in central North Carolina.

Office Information:
25 Park Place, Room 2430
Phone: 404.413.5831
Fax: 404.413.5830

Mailing Address:
Department of English, Georgia State University
P.O. Box 3970, Atlanta, GA 30302-3970