Questions about language drive most of my teaching and research: how does language affect our thinking, our learning, and our relationships with others? How can we learn to attend more critically to the ways that we and others use language, so that we can listen, understand, and disagree more honestly and constructively? These questions root deeply in my own experience, from learning three alphabets simultaneously as a toddler, to interrupting a Southern Appalachian upbringing with a three-year sojourn in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic when I was a teenager.
My efforts to make sense of this cross-cultural mishmash have carried me through academic studies in US, Western, Latin American, and ancient Near Eastern history; Spanish language and literatures; biblical language and literatures; religion and theology; and writing studies (aka rhetoric and composition). I have also worked as an ESL teacher with refugees; a bilingual social worker with mostly undocumented immigrants; a hospital chaplain intern; and an adjunct instructor of humanities, history, religion, and writing at several NC community colleges.
I continue to read as widely as I can in scholarship on writing pedagogy and assessment (especially related to threshold concepts, transfer, grammar, and style), the critical study of ancient texts (most notably the Hebrew Bible), contemporary U.S. LatinX writers, and the role of religious ideologies in public discourse.
I joined the UNC Asheville English Department as a lecturer in the fall of 2012. Since then, I have taught first-year writing (LANG 120) every semester, as well as courses on English grammar, writing pedagogy, U.S. LatinX writers, the Hebrew Bible, and the Ancient World (HUM 124).