MFA, Fiction, George Mason University, expected 2026

MA, English, Texas Tech University, 2023

BA, English, Texas Tech University, 2021

Summa Cum Laude; President’s List

AA, Radio/TV/Film, South Plains College, 2018

George Mason University | 2023–2026

English 101: Composition | Instructor of Record (3 semesters, 4 sections)

• Designed and taught first‑year writing courses for ~19 students per section, aligned with GMU Composition Program outcomes.

• Led weekly instruction, workshops, and one‑on‑one conferences to support rhetorical awareness and multimodal literacy.

• Assessed major writing projects and provided detailed formative and summative feedback.

English 201: Reading and Writing About Texts | Instructor of Record (2 semesters, 2 sections)

• Developed literature‑based writing courses for ~27 students per section with full autonomy over texts and assignments.

• Taught close reading, genre analysis, and literary interpretation across fiction, poetry, nonfiction, graphic novels, and film.

• Designed scaffolded assignments that strengthened analytical writing and critical thinking.

English 398: Fiction Writing | Instructor of Record (1 semester)

• Facilitated an upper‑level fiction workshop for 19 students, emphasizing craft, revision, and collaborative critique.

• Selected diverse contemporary readings and created generative writing exercises.

• Provided extensive written feedback and individualized conferences.

English 301: The Fields of English | Teaching Assistant (1 semester)

• Supported a 50‑student introductory course to English studies.

• Graded assignments and exams, facilitated group discussions, and provided written and oral feedback.

Writing Center Consultant (2 semesters)

Writing Center Consultant of the Year, 2024

• Conducted in‑person and online consultations supporting students at all stages of the writing process.

• Worked extensively with multilingual writers and adapted strategies to varied linguistic backgrounds.

Texas Tech University | Instructor & TA | 2021–2023

English 1301 & 1302: Essentials of College Rhetoric (4 semesters, 8 sections)

• Taught first‑year writing courses as both TA and instructor of record, designing syllabi and assignments aligned with TTU standards.

• Guided students through rhetorical analysis, research practices, and multimodal communication.

• Selected as one of two MA instructors for the 2023 Labor‑Based Contract Grading Research Pilot under Dr. Callie Kostelich.

Editorial Assistant, Phoebe — Incarcerated Writers Project (2025–2026)

Associate Fiction Editor, Iron Horse Literary Review (2021–2023)

Creative Manager & Graduate Intern, Texas Tech Canterbury (2021–2023)

UIL Regional Ready Writing Judge (2022)

Podcast & Video Production Intern, Preemptive Love Coalition (2020)

Peer Writing Tutor, South Plains College & Texas Tech University (2016–2019)

Leadership Board, Kindling MFA Reading Series (2024–2026)

President, Texas Tech Canterbury (2020–2023); Vice President, Texas Tech Canterbury (2019)

President, SPeCtra (South Plains College Gender and Sexuality Association) (2017–2018); Vice President, SPeCtra (2017)

Honorary Leadership Board Member, Lubbock PFLAG (2017–2019)

2nd Place Winner, Texas Book Festival Short Story Contest (2014)

Volunteer, St. Benedict’s Center for the Homeless (2021–2023)

Sermon Writer, LGBTQIA+ Pride Mass (2022)

Founder and Organizer, First South Plains College Pride Week (2018)

Founder and Organizer, First Free HIV Clinic at South Plains College (2017)

Workshops with Tania James, Helon Habila, Alexia Arthurs, Nickolas Butler, Courtney Brkic, Marcus Burke, Jacqueline Kolosov; Proficient in Canvas, Blackboard, Microsoft Office, Slack, Adobe Acrobat; Extensive experience teaching MLA and APA conventions.

First‑Year Writing Pedagogy, Multimodal Composition, Composition and Rhetoric Pedagogy, Labor‑Based and Alternative Assessment, Writing Center Theory & Practice, Rhetorical Genre Studies, Equity‑Minded and Inclusive Pedagogy, Creative Writing Pedagogy.

While earning two master’s degrees I’ve had the privilege to teach English classes to a variety of students. These five years of teaching have convinced me that humanities courses, specifically English classes, have been the most crucial in their cognitive and emotional development. While the skills they will develop in more career-specific classes may also be important for getting into the job market, engaging in the civic sphere, developing a conscientious imagination, and robust sense of empathy, requires exercising other kinds of muscles. These are skills developed in the classes I’ve taught: composition, literature, and creative writing.

In order to strengthen students’ competencies in these areas, I’ve learned that the English classroom is best approached as a collaborative ecosystem, a shared commons for exploration, cultivating critical thinking skills, empathy, and a host of other tools that have become increasingly rare in the public sphere. My job as instructor is to foster community in the classroom. This means ensuring that students do not have to check their experiences, interests, perspectives, history, and passions at the door. These are crucial to the rhetorical purposes of, say, a composition class which prepares students for the communicative and social situations they are facing or will face in the future. To do this, my teaching incorporates my other philosophies about the balance of power and labor and utilizes voices that can expand all of our horizons.

Because my duty as a teacher is to introduce my students to experiences and perspectives that are not their own, I use examples and resources that have been crafted by and feature people from multiple races, ethnicities, gender identities, sexualities, bodies, and languages. Not only does this allow marginalized students to see their experiences represented in literature (knowing that they are not alone), it also helps make my classroom a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive space. This means choosing classroom texts that showcase a variety of voices. For instance, in the literature courses I’ve taught, I strive to choose readings that can be relevant and surprising to my students. Contemporary and classic authors who have particularly resonated with my students are the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Octavia Butler, and Ocean Vuong, among many others. In encountering the work of writers of colors and other writers who have been excluded from typical literary canons, I believe my English class cultivates in students a greater capacity of empathy, empowerment, and a wider, deeper sense of the world.

Reading these diverse voices can sometimes create challenging conversations (if we’re doing it right, they will), so it is important that I, as an instructor, ensure that all dialogue is healthy, honest, and inquiry based. To do this, and to proactively prevent bullying behavior, on the first day of class, I hand out a list of community guidelines that the students are collectively free to add to but must agree to if they are to stay in the class. An example of one of these community guidelines would be to “be aware of the difference between intent and impact” or to encourage the use of “I-language to share experiences, perspectives, and opinions without universalizing them.” The community guidelines don’t operate from a censorship or policing standpoint, but instead seek to offer tools that encourage bravery, empathy, respect, and rhetorical complexity among students. I believe that a posture of learning is best cultivated when people feel accepted and included as they are. Students should feel safe and secure enough to speak about their actual struggles and joys. This needs to begin with me as an educator.

If my goal is to create an equitable classroom that empowers my students, I need to be able to be willing to transcend my own internalized biases and aware of how typical academic expectations might be unhelpful. In times of political and economic turmoil, we as instructors need to find ways to empower our students learning, rather than hindering it. I have found that contract grading is my preferred avenue for this work. This conclusion is informed by experiences in teaching at both Texas Tech University and George Mason University, schools with significant immigrant populations. These times aren’t exactly easy on immigrants, to say the least. While at Texas Tech, I participated in a state-of-the-art research program involving labor-based grading contracts. Part of my intention with this research was to think about how to make the English classroom into a place of empowerment for students of color and immigrant students who face significant outside challenges that impact classroom work.

All of my courses, writing and literature classes, use contract grading based on a student’s writing process and the completion of work rather than on the quality of that work. I firmly believe that a students’ reading and writing abilities improve by doing it more. Additionally, not worrying about whether their instructor thinks their writing is good or bad will ideally encourage students to take more risks in writing and be more authentic in their writing voice. I still provide feedback to students, of course. However, this feedback is freed from pejorative effects on their grade. Their grade is now the reward for their labor. Through my research and experience with grading contracts, I learned that though students have been trained their entire academic lives to expect the kind of reward-and-punishment that comes with traditional grades, they relish the chance to participate in the writing process when it is separated from the pressures of getting the ‘correct’ grade. Often, if students are given the chance, they will step up and make the most of the writing process when they see its benefit for creating. Contract grading contributes to freeing the classroom from many of the inequities that students of color, immigrants, and other minoritized students face in most academic contexts. It also emphasizes process over product, something increasingly becoming necessary as technology changes our students’ perspectives on what writing is.

When I began teaching at the college level, ChatGPT was just arriving on the market. As such, the sweeping presence of generative artificial intelligence has increasingly become something that I believe English instructors must contend with head-on. It cannot be avoided. For many of our students, generative AI technology makes pumping out an instant essay possible. We as educators of composition and literature must be willing to move beyond the end product as a goal and demonstrate the importance of the process itself. I know that the process/product debate is ongoing, but AI has made the conversation extremely practical. It has become crucial to demonstrate to students the limitations of this burgeoning technology. While generative AI has demonstrated an impressive ability to mimic human writing on the sentence level, it has proven to be significantly lacking in other abilities we strive to cultivate in the humanities, such as analyzing the truthfulness of a source, participating in ethical projects that transcend corporate interests, and judging the beauty of a piece of art. I often tell my students that bringing AI-generated work into a writing class is akin to bringing stale, store-bought Zebra Cakes to a baking class. Not only does this corporate product hinder a student’s chance at developing a useful skill, but it is also a sorry substitute for the real thing.

This is the kind of space I hope my classroom can become every semester. My class is never just essays and whiteboards. Instead, students will find my class to be a place of discovery –an equitable landscape to uncover and generate aesthetic, ethical excellence and navigate public discourse effectively.