My name is Carmen Kynard and I am an associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York (CUNY).   I have worked at a variety of institutions now, but always with a particular commitment to those places and programs that enroll large numbers of first-generation students AND/OR working class students AND/OR students of color.  

In my previous positions, I have worked as the director of a first year writing program and English professor at St. John’s University.  Before that, I worked in the Department of Urban Education at Rutgers-Newark University and in the Department of English at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York.  I am a former high school teacher with the New York City public schools/Coalition of Essential Schools and have led numerous projects focusing on issues of language, literacy, and learning: consultant for the Community Learning Centers Grant Project in Harlem, educational consultant and curriculum developer for the African Diaspora Institute/Caribbean Cultural Center of New York, instructional coordinator for the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, seminar leader for the New York City Writing Project, and seminar leader for Looking Both Ways.  Each setting has propelled a different set of experiences and perspectives on the polemics of schooling, higher education, and marginalized communities of color.

My work today sits at the crossroads of composition-rhetoric studies, new literacies studies, and urban education.  I am most interested in interrogating race and the politics of writing instruction in secondary and post-secondary settings and institutions, looking closely at the ways racialized political economies get expressed as literacy praxis. I strive to bring to my research, teaching, and service a commitment to educational change where the humanities, writing studies, and critical pedagogy (in theory and in practice) work in conjunction.  I have published in Harvard Educational Review, Changing English, College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition, Reading Research Quarterly and more. My first book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies (SUNY Press, 2013) makes Black Freedom a 21st century literacy movement.  I trace and challenge my ideas and ideals about research and teaching at my website, “Education, Liberation, and the Black Radical Tradition” (http://carmenkynard.org). If the conversation is truly about multiple literacies, political access/action, justice for racially subordinated communities, and critical pedagogy, I am all in!

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