I’m Jesse Rice-Evans. My time is split between being a sick & disabled queer Southerner, poet & rhetorician, and amateur herbalist & Tarot expert.
In fall 2017, I started my first year at the CUNY Graduate Center pursuing a Ph.D. in English, Composition and Rhetoric, digital dis-composed narratives, rhetorical activisms in queer & disabled communities, and embodiment theory in digital writing.
I am currently the nonfiction and poetry editor of Identity Theory.
My first full-length collection on disability and femme identity, titled The Uninhabitable, is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in 2019.
Check out my digital chapbook here.
I teach First-Year Composition, Queer Literature, and Writing for Engineers at the City College of New York and at the Cooper Union Center for Writing. 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 spring 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.
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 in my work in the Center for Writing at The Cooper Union.
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 disability/ies to my students and WPAs/faculty mentors.
I’m also now a disability activist and advocate on all three of my campuses, 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:
