I’m Jesse Rice-Evans (she/her/hers), sick & disabled neuroqueer Southerner, poet & rhetorician, and Leo homebody.
Since fall 2017, I’ve been working on my Ph.D. in English, Composition and Rhetoric at the CUNY Graduate Center, where I study digital dis-composed narratives, femme rhetoric in queer & disabled communities, and embodiment theory in digital writing.
Now I’m a doctoral candidate and developing my dissertation project, an autotheoretical autoethnography that examines academic forms of ableism, graduate study in a chronically ill neuroqueer body, and digital expressions of embodiment, language, and power. I also explore anti-Black and settler-colonialist practices in higher education, explicate my own whiteness, and embrace prose/multimedia work in this project and others.
I’m currently doing loads of fun stuff:
- HASTAC Scholar 2019-2021
- Web Development and Documentation Fellow with the CUNY Humanities Alliance
- Digital Pedagogy Fellow at the OpenLab at City Tech
- Co-Chair, CompComm
- Co-Chair, GC Poetics
- Committee member, GC Access Now!
- Freelance accessibility and pedagogy consultant
Oh, I also write poetry and non-fiction!
My first full-length collection on disability and femme identity, titled The Uninhabitable, is out from Sibling Rivalry Press
Check out my digital chapbook NOON here.
I’ve performed my creative work at Poets House, the Brooklyn Museum, the CUNY Graduate Center and City College, UNC Asheville, and many more.
I have taught First-Year Composition, Queer Literature, and Writing for Engineers at the City College of New York, as well as digital pedagogy workshops and trainings at the New York City College of Technology with my work at the OpenLab. Additionally, I taught Multimodal Writing at Baruch College and an upper-level creative writing seminar called Creative Biography at the University of North Carolina Asheville, respectively.
In the fall of 2018, I co-taught a hybrid first-year writing seminar (FIQWS) on queer textuality, writing identity, and vulnerability as activist rhetoric titled That’s So Gay!: Queer Texts in the U.S. with Prof. Andréa Stella, a doctoral student at CUNY Graduate Center. We have been committed to making full use of the hybrid designations and have embraced a number of new technologies since beginning to teach online in 2017. We fought homophobic administration at CCNY since 2016 to get this course approved, and we have a piece forthcoming in Mad Scholars Anthology edited by Shayda Kafai, Ph.D. and Melanie Jones, Ph.D. candidate, about femme access pedagogy and That’s So Gay!
Since 2018, I have also worked as a Digital Pedagogy Fellow with the OpenLab at City Tech developing workshops and online initiatives for faculty, staff, and students at City Tech, as well as collaborating across departments on hybrid and accessible learning initiatives.
Finally, I also teach poetry workshops on embodiment, disability, and Tarot poetics.
My pedagogy and academic work also centers disability/chronic illness, as I’ve been coping with chronic pain since 2014. I’ve been diagnosed with hypermobile spectrum disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, and chronic pain, in addition to complex PTSD and ADD; these disabilities have deeply affected my daily routines and my approach to teaching. As a result, I’ve increased my commitment to radical vulnerability, to coming out as having invisible disabilities to my students and WPAs/faculty mentors.
I’m also now a disability activist and advocate in all of my professional roles, in addition to belonging to several activist and interdependence communities online.
Oh, and I’m a hopeless Leo. Follow me on Twitter & Instagram.
On top of all my research and writing, I also have an Etsy shop! I’m a part-time city/chronic illness witch, and I make my own herbal medicine, read tarot, do energy work and personalized spellwork. If you need witch services, hire a chronically ill graduate student!
You can hire me for a few other things:
- accessibility consulting (academic, non-profit, & corporate)
- poetry/nonfiction workshop facilitation
- trauma-informed/embodiment writing workshop facilitation
- professional writing consulting (resumes, cover letters, & applications)
- accessible pedagogy workshop facilitation (academic)
Reach out below:
