I'm Mable,

a writer, artist, and educator. I work as an adjunct professor teaching undergraduate courses in English, creative writing, and communications, and additionally support undergraduates with English career preparation and secondary English educator training. I am a poet and writer with work published or forthcoming in Teach. Write., Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, The Threepenny Review, Action, Spectacle, #TeachLivingPoets, and Greater Good, among other outlets. My undergraduate training was in English, and my graduate work includes a certificate in instructional design from the University of Illinois, a Master of Arts in Teaching from Notre Dame of Maryland University, and a creative writing MFA (in progress) from Spalding University.

Originally from a rural town near the Baltimore, Maryland area (home of some truly powerful art--see Lucille Clifton, the American Visionary Arts Museum, Edgar Allan Poe, Billie Holiday, and Mr. Trash Wheel), I have previously worked as a journalist, editor, and middle school language arts teacher. While the content and learners I teach now are different from those I worked with years ago, I am still passionate about fostering not just understanding of literature and rhetoric, but also critical thinking (what else is writing?), intentionality in communication (what else is revision?), and care and courage (what else is discussion?), as I believe these are crucial elements for participating in a scholarly and/or creative community. I am also very interested in transfer-focused pedagogies as represented in this MLA Profession piece from Ellen C. Carillo.

I continue to work on growing in developing a pedagogy that is uplifting, rigorous, creative, lively, culturally responsive, and engaged in relevant questions of critical interpretation that are in context, importantly, with students' lived experiences and current social realities. For this reason, I'm currently particularly interested in the work of poet-essayists, alternative workshop models, gamification and creative expository writing assignments (to borrow from Felicia Rose Chavez, essaying "on and off the page"), arts integration, and learning technologies and AI. In my own scholarly and critical work, I am currently most interested in posthumanism, Humanities 2.0, prosody, the Gothic mode, transdisciplinary approaches to literature (such as intellectual history), representations of dignity, and rhetoric studies.

I often return to this quote from scholar Donna J. Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: "It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” As the humanities are increasingly called into question, I like to think that if I approach my own small niche of creative, critical, and pedagogical work with Haraway's framework in mind, I can contribute to (and support the intergenerational flourishing of) equitable, hopeful, and multidisciplinary dialogue, truth-telling, and meaning-making, which I believe does have the power to create positive change and will define the interlaced future of the field.