SPEAKERS
Click on speakers name to read bio.
Dr. Lloyd L. Lee
University of New Mexico
Dr. Kimberly Wieser
University of Oklahoma
Dr. Christie Toth
University of Utah
Dr. Daniel Cole
Hofstra University
Dr. Resa Crane Bizzaro
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Velma Hale
Diné College
Velma Hale
Velma Hale is a Diné (Navajo). Her maternal clan is One Who Walks Around You (Honágháanii) clan, born for Salt Water clan (Tódík'ózhi). Her maternal grandfather is a Blacksheep People (Dibe' Łizhini) clan, and her paternal grandfather is the Towering House (Kinyaa'áanii) People clan; in Diné their clan-group is their genetic name. Velma's matriarchal roots are from Gold Springs of Hunter's Point and Oaksprings, Arizona, residing on the Navajo Nation. Velma is the granddaughter of Red Woman (Asdzaan Lichee') and late parents Vernon and Sadie Hale. Her American name is Velma Hale. Velma Hale is credentialed in English, Humanities, and Education courses and is a faculty within the School of Arts, Humanities, and English Division and the Northwest Teacher Education Program at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona. Furthermore, she also taught with the Diné Dual Language Teachers Project, a Title III National Professional Development Project at Northern Arizona University. She has taught courses in ESL and bilingual methodology to in-service and pre-service teachers.
Dr. Resa Crane Bizzaro
Of Cherokee and Meherrin descent, Resa Crane Bizzaro earned degrees in Creative Writing, Literature, and Composition and has taught for more than thirty five years. As a professional, Resa has been a member of College Composition and Communication (CCCC), National Council of Teachers of English, and South Atlantic MLA, among other organizations. A recipient of a CCCC Scholars for the Dream Award, Resa served as a Co-Chair of the CCCC American Indian Caucus, a member of the CCCC Executive Committee, and a member or chair of many other professional committees. In 2012, Resa consulted at University of the Free State in South Africa in developing a literacy program. She has published articles on Native identity rhetorics, intergenerational Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, contemporary poetry, and southern literature. Resa teaches undergraduate writing courses and lives with her husband, Patrick, and son, Antonio, in western Pennsylvania.
Dr. Daniel Cole
Daniel Cole is an Associate Professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric at Hofstra University. A non-Native scholar, he researches the interaction of Native and settler rhetorics in the US during the Removal era, including Native responses to official, cultural, and pseudo-scientific discourses of genocide, as well as textual issues of identity, entanglement, and circulation in captivity narratives and “as-told-to” texts. His broader interests include writing pedagogy, and rhetorics of/in conflict in civic discourse, along with theories of rhetorical circulation, of decolonization, and of the contact zone. His scholarship has appeared in Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, and The WAC Journal. In addition, he has written public commentary in venues such as Inside Higher Education and Current on topics ranging from the conceptual to the practical, including cultural-political myths, media ecologies, and grading student essays with efficiency and integrity. At Hofstra, he teaches courses including "Strategies of Writing Against Power and Oppression," "Words and Meanings" (a course on language change and epistemology), and first year composition. For over ten years, he has taught a dedicated first-semester composition course for engineering majors. He has also served as Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Hofstra.
Dr. Christie Toth
Christie Toth is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Her research focuses on a range of issues related to writing instruction at open admissions institutions, including equity in writing placement, community college composition faculty members' disciplinary and professional identities, and transfer student writing experiences. Informed by scholarship in Indigenous rhetorics regarding place and relationality, she works closely with writing faculty and students at Salt Lake Community College on initiatives to support transfer students and create professional development opportunities for graduate students interested in community college teaching.
Christie has researched locally responsive writing pedagogies with students and faculty at Diné College, and she has taught composition courses at its Crownpoint campus. These learning experiences have been foundational to her work as a teacher and scholar. At the University of Utah, Christie teaches critical courses on rhetorics of settler colonialism and collaborates with department colleagues working toward decolonial practices across the writing and rhetoric studies curriculum. Recently, she has worked with staff and students at the University of Utah's American Indian Resource Center to provide on-site peer writing support for Native students.
Dr. Kimberly Wieser
Dr. Kimberly Wieser is Associate Chair and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma as well as affiliated Native Studies and Environmental Studies faculty. Her book Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies—winner of the NWCA First Books Award for Prose 2004—was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2017. Wieser is one of the co-chairs for American Indian Caucus for NCTE/CCCC and serves as a Managing Editor at Constellations: A Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space. She directs the activities of the Native Writers Circle of the Americas at OU.
Dr. Wieser is one of the co-authors of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, named one of the most important books in the field in the first decade of the 21st century by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. Her poetry collection Texas... to Get Horses was published by That Painted Horse Press in 2019. She is the recipient of a National Humanities Center Summer Residency for this June where she will work on her second collection “War Began to Kindle and Was Cruelly Fought”: Historical Poems from The DeSoto Chronicles.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Dr. Wieser has co-edited four publications on anti-racism in rhetoric and writing studies in the academy with Ersula Ore and Christina Cedillo–NCTE/CCCC Cross-Caucus Special Issue. Diversity is not an End Game: BIPOC Futures in the Academy, Present Tense 9.2 (March 2022; “Symposium: Diversity is not Justice—Working Toward Radical Transformation and Racial Equity in the Discipline,” College Composition and Communication 7.2 (2021); NCTE/CCCC Cross-Caucus Composition Studies Special Issue. Diversity is not Equity: BIPOC Scholars Speak to Systemic Racism in the Academy and Field 49.2 2021; and “Diversity is not Enough: Mentorship and Community-Building as Antiracist Praxis.” Rhetoric Review 49.3 (2021).
Dr. Wieser is currently editing Indians, Oil, & Water: Indigenous Ecologies and Literary Resistance/Poetry and Prose Honoring the 25thAnniversary American Indian & Indigenous Storytelling Literary Festival with Dr. Rain Prud’homme-Cranford (University of Calgary), which contains a forward by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma, and includes works by noted authors such as US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and National Book Award Finalist Honorèe Fanonne Jeffers. This volume, funded by University of Oklahoma’s Faculty Investment Program and OU Arts and Humanities Forum, is forthcoming from That Painted Horse Press in 2021. Dr. Wieser is also editing, with the help of research assistant OU English doctoral student Brian Daffron, American Indian Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students, which is forthcoming from Bloomsbury (formerly Greenwood/ABC-CLIO).
She has written and published individual poems, academic articles, and chapters in academic collections, short stories, book reviews, and reference entries. She is a playwright, screenwriter, and actress, with two of her most recent roles being on AMC’s The Son and in the independent film Thistle Creek.
Dr. Lloyd L. Lee
Lloyd L. Lee, Ph.D. is an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation. He is Kinyaa' áanii (Towering House), born for Tł'ááschíí (Red Cheeks). His maternal grandfather’s clan is Áshįįhi (Salt) and his paternal grandfather’s clan is Tábąąhá (Water’s Edge).
He is Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of New Mexico (UNM). He is the Director of the Center for Regional Studies (CRS) at UNM and editor of the Wicazo Sa Review journal. He sits on the Council for the American Indian Studies Association (AISA).
He is the author of Diné Identity in a 21st Century World (2020), Diné Masculinities: Conceptualizations and Reflections (2013), co-author of Native Americans and the University of New Mexico (2017), and edited Navajo Sovereignty: Understandings and Visions of the Diné People (2017) and Diné Perspectives: Reclaiming and Revitalizing Navajo Thought (2014). His research focuses on Native American/American Indian identity, masculinities, leadership, philosophies, and Native Nation building.
Orlando White
Diné College
Dine Critical Thinking in the Composition Classroom
Wednesday May 12 at 2:40pm MDT
Orlando White is from Tółikan, Arizona. He is Diné of the Naaneesht’ézhi Tábaahí and born for the Naakai Diné’e. White is the author of two books of poetry, Bone Light (Red Hen Press), which Kazim Ali described as a “careful excavation on language and letters and the physical body” and LETTERRS (Nightboat Books) which received the Poetry Center Book Award. His work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere. White teaches at Diné College and lives in Tsaile, Arizona.
Jaquetta Shade-Johnson
University of Missouri-Columbia
Writing Our Stories: Constellating the Field, First-Year Writing, and Tribal Colleges (Parts 1 & 2)
Wednesday May 12 at 9:15am (Part 1)
Thursday May 13 at 9:10am (Part 2)
Dr. Jaquetta Shade-Johnson is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation (ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ) with Chinese and Euroamerican ancestry and an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the Department of English and the School of Visual Studies' Digital Storytelling Program. She teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, Indigenous literature, digital storytelling, and Native American and Indigenous studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University in 2018, along with a graduate specialization in American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Her research at the intersections of cultural rhetorics, Indigenous studies, digital storytelling, and environmental humanities investigates the constellative knowledge production and rhetorical practices of meaning-making within cultural communities. She is primarily interested in how Indigenous communities make meaning through storied relationships with land and through the rhetorical, everyday, embodied practices of material production--such as foodways--that stem from these relationships. Through her current research, teaching, and service, Professor Shade-Johnson is ultimately interested in Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, and making as rhetorical, decolonizing strategies for disrupting colonial structures that uphold systemic violence. She currently serves as faculty advisor for the University of Missouri’s Indigenous student organization, Four Directions, and as a founding editor in the editorial collective for Spark: a 4C4Equality Journal, a digital, open-access, peer-reviewed journal addressing activism in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies.
Cornel Pewewardy
Portland State University
Writing Back: Disrupting European narratives and reclaiming through rhetoric sovereignty
Wednesday May 12 at 11:05am MDT
Dr. Cornel Pewewardy (Comanche-Kiowa) is Professor Emeritus, Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University. Professor Pewewardy’s research explores the theoretical and philosophical foundations of postcolonial Indigenous research paradigms that focused on historical and political insight into the lingering impact of colonization, considering the issues faced by Indigenous peoples today and identities to survive in the twenty-first century. From his early work as an educational administrator to more recent work on creating Indigenous charter schools, he focuses on strategies to enhance higher education institution’s connectivity and partnerships with Indigenous nations to advance the education of Indigenous students and explore university-tribal engagement. In addition, he and colleagues have been working closely with teachers and school leaders to construct a progressive model specific to the continuum of consciousness educators experience as they develop their understanding and employment of decolonizing theories and pedagogies. Presenting the Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model for almost three decades at professional conferences across the U.S., Pewewardy has applied his theoretical model to the work of educational practice, primarily using case studies with Indigenous learners, systems and structures in efforts to nurture Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies in educational settings toward decolonization.
Andrea Riley-Mukavetz
Grand Valley State University
Making Space for Our Relations: Indigenous Paradigms in the First-Year Writing Classroom
Thursday May 13 at 11:00am MDT
Andrea Riley Mukavetz is an Assistant Professor of Integrative Studies at Grand Valley State University. Her research areas are in Indigenous Studies, Rhetoric and Writing, community-based research, story as methodology, and land-based practices. Andrea has published in College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, enculturation: a journal of writing, rhetoric, and culture, and Studies in American Indian Literature. Her book, You Better Go See Geri: An Odawa Elder's Life of Resilience and Recovery is forthcoming from Oregon State University in Fall 2021. She is the co-chair of the American Indian Caucus for NCTE/CCCC, the editor for the Pedagogy Blog from constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space, and a co-founder of The Cultural Rhetorics Consortium. Andrea is a citizen of Deshkan Ziibing (Chippewa of Thames First Nation) and of Chaldean and Lebanese ancestries. Growing up in Metro Detroit, Andrea is fond of spending time with the Great Lakes and harvesting wild grape leaves.
Irvin Morris
Diné College
T’ááshabik’ehgo: In the Manner of the Sun, or How I Use the Diné Educational Philosophy to Teach Composition at Diné College
Thursday May 13 at 1:50pm MDT
Irvin Morris is the English name of the aging, crotchety Diné writer and educator who is Tábaahí, Tótsohnii, Tó'áhaní, and Kinyaa'áanii. He has taught at Cornell University, the State University of New York / Buffalo, the University of Arizona, Navajo Technical University, and Diné College, where he currently teaches. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing / Fiction from Cornell, and a BA in Literature / Creative Writing from the University of California. He has 30 years of teaching experience at the college and university level and has taught at NTU and DC since 2001. He is also a published author whose book, FROM THE GLITTERING WORLD, is often used in literature courses throughout the country.
Barbara Komlos
Montana State University
American Indian College Writers: A Montana Perspective
Wednesday May 12 at 1:00pm MDT
Barbara Komlos earned her Doctorate in Higher Education at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman, Montana. Her doctoral research focused on the factors that influence the success of Native American academic writers. Consequently, she developed a first-year composition course at MSU for Native students that evolved to welcome all students interested in exploring Indigenous perspectives. Her scholarship on Native American first-year writing has been published in the Tribal College Journal and the Journal of Basic Writing. Dr. Komlos also serves as program evaluator for the Montana University System Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership program, facilitates faculty workshops around inclusive pedagogy and culturally responsive mentoring, and serves as program evaluator for projects in rural and tribal communities in Montana.
Dev K. Bose
University of Arizona
Universal Design for Learning and Neurodivergence in the Writing Classroom: A Class for All
Wednesday May 12 at 1:50pm MDT
Dev K. Bose, Ph.D. (he/him) is an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona, affiliating as Assistant Director in Writing Program, faculty in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English, Faculty Fellow for the Disability Cultural Center, and Co-Chair for the Disability Studies Initiative. He researches rhetorical privilege and access pertaining to technology and invisible disabilities. His work has appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly, Deaf Studies Encyclopedia, Enculturation, Technoculture, Currents in Teaching and Learning, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Chronicle of Higher Education.
Isabel Baca
University of Texas - El Paso
Serving and Learning as we Write
Thursday May 13 at 1:00pm MDT
Dr. Isabel Baca is an Associate Professor of English in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her current scholarship explores key challenges that face theorists and practitioners of community writing and service-learning in writing studies. Her research addresses community literacy needs and how academia can help meet these needs. Her publication, Service-Learning and Writing: Paving the Way for Literacy(ies) through Community Engagement (2012), is an edited collection that demonstrates how writing instruction and/or writing practice can complement community engagement and outreach in local, national, and international contexts. Her most recent, major publication, a co-edited collection, Bordered Writers: Latinx Identities and Literacy Practices at Hispanic-Serving Institution (2019) focuses on how the teaching of writing should be more inclusive to foster student success, especially for Latinx students. In addition, you can find more of Baca’s publications in community-based journals, such as Reflections: A Journal of Community Engaged Writing and Rhetoric. Baca received the 2017 University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, and her co-edited collection Bordered Writers received the 2021 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Advancement of Knowledge Book Award.
