I am director of the Writing and Rhetoric Program and Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Middlebury College. I love to explore genres and have published short fiction, essays, articles and poems in Negative Capability Journal, Blue Mesa Review, The Feminist Wire, Hurricane Alice, Narrative Northeast, Journal of Gender and Cultural Critique (formerly Phoebe), and Children, Churches and Daddies, to name a few. I’ve earned several awards for my fiction, including first place in the Roy W. Cowden contest and finalist for the G.S. Sharat Chandra and Negative Capability prizes. I’ve also co-authored an oral history, Vermonters At Their Craft (New England Press), and co-edited a collection of essays, Social Justice Education: Inviting Faculty to Transform Their Institutions (Stylus Press).

As a teacher, I invite students to explore issues of identity and power in relation to writing purposes, practices and productions. I encourage an embodied approach to writing by incorporating contemplative practices and movement into my classes, and draw on dancer Liz Lerman’s critical response process in writing workshops. I am always engaged in conversation with other faculty on the topic of pedagogy, and collaborated on several Mellon-funded projects, Writing Beyond Borders and Social Justice in Higher Education, to facilitate faculty development across liberal arts colleges.

An eighth generation Vermonter, I received a Susan D. Wagley environmental research grant for my newly completed (not yet published) novel, Tipton’s Town Clerk, which explores social and environmental history in western Vermont, as well as erosion of U.S. democracy during Bush’s “war on terror.” My future writing plans include a sequel about a queer Vermont family, and a multi media project, for which I received an international travel grant, about the nineteenth century journey of Merino Sheep from the Paular Monastery in Sierra de Guadarrama, Spain, to Vermont.

I can be reached at: cwwright@middlebury.edu