I’m Jesse Rice-Evans (she/her/hers), sick & disabled queer 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.
I’m currently doing loads of fun stuff:
- HASTAC Scholar 2019-2021
- Web Development and Documentation Fellow with the CUNY Humanities Alliance
- Co-Chair, English Student Association Conference
- Graduate Teaching Fellow at the City College of New York
- Digital Pedagogy Fellow at the OpenLab at City Tech
- Guest Editor at Visible Pedagogy, the Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center in-house blog on teaching
- 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 teach First-Year Composition, Queer Literature, and Writing for Engineers at the City College of New York, alongside digital pedagogy workshops and trainings at the New York City College of Technology with my work at the OpenLab.
In the past, I have taught Multimodal Writing and an upper-level creative writing seminar called Creative Biography at Baruch College and 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 at CCNY. We have been committed to making full use of the hybrid designations and have embraced a number of new technologies as the semester has unfolded. We fought homophobic administration at CCNY since 2016 to get this course approved.
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.
I’m a digital humanities activist and critical pedagogue, and I regularly include rhetorics of digital writing (memes, gifs, wikis) in my writing courses and workshops.
My pedagogy also centers disability/chronic illness, as I’ve been coping with chronic pain since 2014. I’ve been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and chronic pain, in addition to depression and anxiety; 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 an (actually several) 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.
In 2012, I earned a magna cum laude B.A. in Literature, Creative Writing, and Africana studies from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where I taught a creative writing workshop on multi-genre narratives and worked as a consultant & coordinator in the Writing Center. I also hosted several popular writing groups and reading series, including Redaction, Red Writers—a feminist space for conversation and prose poetry, and the Juniper Bends Reading Series.
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:
