My research focuses on literacy practices, queerness, new materialisms, Appalachian studies, embodied rhetorics, and ideas of agency. A major tenet of my scholarship argues that conventional notions of literacy sponsorship (Brandt) fail to account for all the complexities of meaning making and power relations in queer lives, especially in othered places like Appalachia. More specifically, I conduct queer person-based research in Appalachia in order to expand the scope of literacy sponsorship beyond a traditional focus on human individuals and institutions. By queering literacy methodologies and theories, I suggest that becoming literate involves a vast diversity of non-human agents. Through a new materialist lens (Barad; Bennett; Chen), I theorize literacy as an active, participatory force—moving, shifting, flowing, perhaps even alive in its own way. 

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You can find my recent work in Storytelling in Queer Appalachia: Imagining and Writing the Queer Other (2020). I've been published in the Appalachian Journal and Killjoy Magazine. I have a chapter in the edited collection through Utah University Press, Bodies of Knowledge (expected 2022), wherein I write about embodied technologies, queerness, and hooking-up. I also have an upcoming coauthored chapter on queer Appalachian rhetorics in the Routledge Queer Rhetorics Textbook (expected 2022). My article “Comin’ Out the Broom Closet: Appalachian Pagans and Their Queer Future Worlding” has been accepted into the Journal of Appalachian Studies, Special Issue: Speculative Fabulation: Queering Appalachian Futurisms with University of Illinois Press. Additionally, I've written a chapter for an ecocritical collection on queer and BIPOC Appalachia literature.

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I'm a Kentucky native and lover of all things nature. Outside the classroom, my proclivities include enjoying the company of my feline children, making soap and mead like my ancestors, and spending time in my garden. All photos are credited or are my own. 

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Background photo: Don Sniegowski | Flickr