Carolyn B Ross

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Biography

There is nothing I am more passionate about than teaching writing, research, multimedia composition, and oral communication strategies to undergraduate students – except perhaps working on my own writing, research, multimedia, and spoken projects. I teach these subjects from the inside out, as a practitioner -- a poet, fiction writer, essayist, book author, photographer, videographer, graphic designer, audiographer, and teacher-performer. I believe that research and effective communication in any discipline, medium, or genre demands first a deep and sometimes unsettling process of (re)discovery before it can be crafted into a powerful argument for its intended audience. I endeavor to connect my teaching of writing, rhetoric, and research -- and my students' interests in them -- to topics that are academically intriguing, publicly relevant, and personally compelling. My areas of primary academic interest are eco-literature, where writing is a means of making connections among academic disciplines as well as between personal and social discourse, and community-based writing, where writing is a means of bridging communities and bringing about social change.

I have my B.A. in English and Education from Skidmore College and my M.F.A. in Writing from the University of Oregon. I taught my first college writing class in 1975 and my first at Stanford University in 1989. Many of my writing and rhetoric classes are community-based service-learning courses. I directed the Program in Writing and Rhetoric’s Community Writing Project from 2003-2007.

My poetry and fiction have appeared in The American Scholar, Bennington Review, Calyx, Salmagundi, and Writing in a Nuclear Age (University Press of New England, 1984), among other publications. I have authored two writing texts: Writing Nature: An Ecological Reader for Writers (St. Martin's Press, 1995) and Writing for Real: A Handbook for Writers in Community Service, with coauthor Ardel Thomas (Longman Publishers, 2003).

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