As Associate Professor in the department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures at Michigan State University, I seek to develop culturally-sustaining and asset-based pedagogies (Paris and Alim 2014) for first-year writing students, a population which includes many international and first-generation domestic students. I serve on advisory committees for curriculum development of the first-year writing and developmental writing programs, and I also work with the organizing committee of MSU’s twice-yearly First-Year Writing Conference/Symposium.
Before returning to MSU, I lived in Paris for 25 years and earned my doctorate at the Sorbonne. My thesis, written in French, was a Russian-American influence study framed by Mikhail Bakhtin‘s concepts of literary polyphony, dialogism and heteroglossia. I am fascinated by linguistic and cultural intersections, and the translingual, transcultural, transnational and translocal student populations in Preparation for College Writing are a limitless field of inquiry, as we explore the students’ diverse “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff and Gonzalez 1992).
I am the secretary of the Lansing Poetry Club, and help organize regular readings and workshops. I’m also president of the Michigan College English Association, which offers a yearly Conference for teachers of writing.
I publish poetry and flash fiction internationally and give readings locally. Recently I have begun publishing my artwork as well. To learn more, please visit my Instagram page.
