Research/Teaching Interests: Writing Studies, Community Literacy, Activist AutoEthnography, Addiction Recovery Literacies, Recovery Storytelling, Queer Rhetoric, Queer Literacies, Public Rhetoric, Digital Rhetoric, Research Methods, Qualitative Research, Activist Pedagogy, Multimodal Storytelling Projects, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Feminist Criticism, Gender Studies, Literary Journalism, Digital Humanities
My courses are Safe Zone approved, and were featured in “10 Classes That Make Your St. John’s University Experience Even Better” by Dina Said
I graduated from St. John’s University with a Ph.D. in English in May of 2021, and was the selected graduate speaker for the 2021 St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Virtual Graduate Commencement.
Currently, I am an Adjunct Lecturer for Kean University, as I continue my autoethnographic work.
In Fall of 2022, I co-facilitated a university-wide ACEI Teaching Fellows LGBTQIAP+ Course Content Development and Queer Representation in Curriculum Workshop, with Dr. Lisa Robinson, at St. John’s University, on behalf of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) Interdisciplinary Minor. In the past, I was an Adjunct Associate Professor at St. John’s University, where I taught literature and business writing courses.
My work examines the advocacy and visibility of queer voices within hegemonic storytelling spaces of alcoholism and addiction recovery, working from a rhetorical methodology that embraces queer literacies, intersectionality, and inclusivity beyond the institutional literacy and literary borders of Alcoholics Anonymous, and engages in public recovery literacies.
As a scholar invested in queer visibility and public rhetoric activism, as a Gender Non-Conforming Masc-of-Center Lesbian, I have learned that the telling of my story, her queer recovery literacy narrative within the confines of A.A.’s redemptive qualification paradigm, has hindered my own literacy practices and identity-formation not only as a person in long-term sobriety, as a Queer person who relies on community for survival.
In my work, “Queerstory of Recovery: Literacy and Survival in A.A.,” I use autoethnography as an intervention to disrupt the cis-heteropatriarchal hegemonic narrative telling spaces of Alcoholics Anonymous and the institutionalization of its literacy and literary gendering praxis.
Through what I term as “Queerstory,” I promotes the activism of queer recovery rhetorics. I show how “Voices from Rock Bottom” (VFRB), the Staten Island based digital storytelling project turned podcast (which I founded in May 2018) critiques how Queer rhetors are to conceal their identities because of the program’s cis-heteronormative rhetorical agenda to preserve the patriarchy of A.A. through its cultural performativity.
“Queerstory,” a counter rhetorical methodology calls on queer rhetors to narrativize their authentic, overlapping identities, histories, and literacies as an act of resistance, as rhetorical activism to beyond the prescriptive literacy and literary borders of Alcoholics Anonymous giving participants a platform to coalition for liberation and disrupt that hegemony via public rhetoric.
As a queer rhetorician and writing studies scholar, I believe that queer-affirming research fills some considerable gaps in interdisciplinary scholarship about addiction and recovery literacy because it brings public rhetoric, cultural studies, and writing studies into the conversation.
Doing the work of queer activism also makes a larger contribution to community literacy and writing studies, as anything addiction or recovery related usually gets pocketed into medical rhetoric, social sciences, and/or psychological studies.
