Featured Speakers
Resa Crane Bizzaro
Dr. Resa Crane Bizzaro is a member of the CCCC Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarships, and her research focuses on Native American identity. Of Cherokee and Meherrin descent, Resa studies the rhetorics of unenrolled Native Americans in this country, focusing on exclusions determined by both U.S. and tribal governments. In particular, her work comments upon the loss of rhetorical power and sovereignty indigenous nations in this country face by refusing membership to those people who cannot demonstrate an appropriate blood quantum. Currently, Resa is at work on a project that looks at indigenous peoples and their treatment by the established medical profession, more specifically in the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy. In 2008, Resa joined the faculty at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she is a member of the IUP Native American Awareness Council. Resa is also one of the founders of Blankets for the Elders, a non-profit organization that collects blankets, coats, warm clothing, and heaters for distribution at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Resa's work has appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, and a number of edited collections. She lives in Indiana, PA, with her husband, Patrick, and her son, Antonio.
Resa's talk is titled "Diagnosing Intergenerational Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Or, A Fat Old Indian Woman Fistfights the American Psychiatric Association in East Lansing".
Rochelle Harris
Dr. Rochelle L. Harris is from the Appalachian Mountains in Northwest Georgia where she currently serves as an Intervention Specialist in writing and reading at Fairmount Elementary School while teaching writing at Georgia State University. She earned her Ph.D. in English—with a focus in Rhetoric, Composition, and Creative Nonfiction—at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While at UNL, she was awarded a Regents Fellowship and an American Association of University Women Fellowship; was an editorial assistant for the monograph series Studies in Writing and Rhetoric; and co-directed a Summer Institute of the Nebraska Writing Project. Dr. Harris, who has won two university teaching awards, has taught at the college-level for fifteen years. At the graduate level, she taught in Central Michigan University's Composition and Communication program as well as the Creative Writing program. In 2007, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures graduate program at Michigan State University. In addition, she has taught in such programs as the Governor's Scholars Program for Tennessee Heritage and in Upward Bound as well as served in the community as a literacy tutor, a mentor, a volunteer staff writer for an arts center, and a docent at the Tipton-Haynes Historic Site (Johnson City, TN) and the New Echota State Historic Site (Calhoun, GA). Dr. Harris's creative and academic publications appear in such journals as Pedagogy, The Writing Instructor, symploke, Women's Studies Quarterly, Fourth Genre, Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, and Writing on the Edge; one of her teaching portfolios is showcased in the Peer Review of Teaching Project (http://www.courseportfolio.org/). Her research focuses on the pedagogy of cultural rhetorics as framed through essayistic discourse and rhetorical theory. She is currently completing a book-length memoir, entitled Not From There, Don't Live There.
Rochelle's talk is titled "From Zombies to Writing Groups and Motorcycle Rallies to Memoir: My Search for the Fifth Trope of Rhetoric".
Terese Guinsatao Monberg
Terese Guinsatao Monberg (BA Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; MS and PhD, Rhetoric, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) is a rhetorician interested in methods for locating, excavating, making public, and mobilizing the institutional memories of historically underrepresented groups—with a specific focus in Asian Pacific American and Filipina/o American rhetorical and historical legacies. More broadly, Terese’s work examines the recursive relationships between rhetoric and culture, history and social justice movements, collective identities, and civic participation. In addition to being on the faculty in the RCAH, Terese is core faculty in Rhetoric and Writing, and affiliated faculty in the Asian Pacific American (APA) Studies Specialization. Terese is currently working on a book-length project tracing the emergence of the community-based Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) in relationship to larger economic, social, and global changes impacting Filipino American communities after World War II. In a second and related project, she is looking at the role of “home” and place in designing civic engagement initiatives. Terese is a third-generation (mestiza/hapa/mixed race) Filipina American and the first generation in her family to finish college. She grew up in the city of Chicago.
Terese's talk is titled "Pinay Peminists: Listening for New Locations and Re/visions of Rhetorical Theory".
Gwendolyn Pough
Dr. Gwendolyn D. Pough is an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. She is the author of Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere as well as numerous essays and articles on black feminism, hip-hop, critical pedagogy and black public culture. She has co-edited a special issue of the journal FEMSPEC: an interdisciplinary feminist journal dedicated to critical and creative works in the realms of science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, surrealism, myth, folklore, and other supernatural genres and she has co-edited the critically acclaimed Home Girls Make Some Noise: A Hip-Hop Feminism Anthology. She was awarded an American Association of University Women Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 2003-2004 to complete research on her next book length project about contemporary African American women's book clubs and reading groups. She was recently elected as the incoming Assistant Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. In this four-year term on the officers' team she will move from Assistant Chair to Associate Chair to Chair and finally Immediate Past Chair. She writes romance fiction under the pen name Gwyneth Bolton. She has seven novels and a novella published to date and one novel forthcoming in 2009. She has won several awards for her novels.
Gwen's talk is titled "On Prince Charming and the Strong Black Woman: Race, Representations, Rhetoric and Romance".
Annette Harris Powell
We regret to inform attendees that Dr Powell has had to withdraw from the conference due to a family emergency.
Dora Ramirez-Dhoore
Dr. Dora Ramirez-Dhoore, Associate chair and Assistant professor of Ethnic American literature at Boise State University, earned her Ph.D in Ethnic Literature from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2003. Dora's research, teaching, and service works on bringing textual knowledge, literacy, and the power attached to those ways of knowing to underrepresented populations. Her research engages issues of production and consumption of texts tied to global and transnational perspectives of audience. Her work also incorporates ideas of nation-building while examining the internalization of socio-political global affects within the Latina/o population. Dora is the author of "Dissecting Environmental Racism: Redirecting the Toxic in Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood and Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus" (forthcoming in Ecocritical Approaches to Latin American and Latino Literatures and Cultures, ed. Adrian Kane, McFarland Press, 2010), "The Cyberborderland: Surfing the Web for Xicanidad" (Chicana/Latina Studies, the Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambios Social, 2005) and "Discovering a 'Proper Pedagogy': The Geography of Writing at UTPA," (Teaching Writing with Latino/a Students: Lessons Learned at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, eds. Cristina Kirklighter, Susan Loudermilk, Diana Cardenas, and Susan Wolff Murphy, 2007).
Dora's talk is titled "Racial and Scientific Rhetoric in Eco-Political Matters: Third World Women Workers in Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus and Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood".
Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés
Dr. Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés was born in New Jersey to Cuban parents. She attended Miami Dade Community College then University of Miami where she earned a BA in Creative Writing. Later earned a Masters in English from Barry University and wrote a thesis on Toni Morrison's first four novels. Went to SUNY-Albany to study with Morrison and earn her Doctorate of Arts in English. While there, she studied with Lil Brannon, Cy Knoblauch, worked in the Writing Center and served as a facilitator for the Women's Studies Teaching Collective. She was tenured at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where she directed the Women's Studies Program. She teaches literature and writing at the University of Central Florida. She has co-chaired the NCTE Latino/a Caucus for 15 years. She has published essays on race, class, gender, narrative and ethnicity with a focus on pedagogy. Her first book is a collection of stories called Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles.
Cecilia's talk is titled "‘My English is Not Very Good Looking’ — Accents and Identities".
