Hi!
I’m Jesse Rice-Evans (she/her/hers), sick & disabled neuroqueer Southerner, poet & rhetorician, and Leo homebody.
Welcome to my website! Use the menu at the top of the page (hamburger menu on mobile) to navigate to different pages on this site.
Image description: An art deco-style portrait on the left from Michaela Oteri’s Cripplepunk series! Depicts Jesse, a fat white femme with short hair and a lavender cane, wearing a purple backpack, lipstick, and a “Femmes Against Fascism” t-shirt. Both her upper arms sport botanical tattoos.
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.
I’m currently doing loads of fun stuff:
- Mutual Aid: Free Editing
- CEO, Jesse Rice-Evans Medical LLC
- Resources Editor at Anti-Ableist Composition Collective
- Poetry Mentor at Brooklyn Poets – The Bridge
- Web Development and Documentation Fellow with the CUNY Humanities Alliance
- Digital Pedagogy Fellow at the OpenLab at City Tech
- Co-Chair, GC Composition and Rhetoric Community
- Co-Chair, GC Poetics
- Committee member, GC Access Now!
- Freelance accessibility and pedagogy consultant
- Poet and nonfiction writer & performer
During the pandemic, my health has gotten much worse without regular access to medical care. As such, I’ve been learning how to say no to opportunities that feel unsustainable for me and I’ve increased my mutual aid work to secure ongoing financial support for Black and brown sick and disabled folks.
Oh, I also write poetry and non-fiction! See my Publications page for a list of recent and selected work.
A 2021 recipient of the Barbara and Carl Zydney Grant for Artists with Disabilities through NYFA, my first full-length collection on disability and femme identity, titled The Uninhabitable, is out from Sibling Rivalry Press! Please rate &/or review on Goodreads.
Currently, I’m submitting my second manuscript ACNE, a hybrid lyric essay/poetry collection, to independent and small presses and finishing edits on my third collection, poems based on Grey’s Anatomy. All of my work explores sick and disabled embodiment, medicalization and trauma, and self-medicating and “wellness” strategies in late capitalism.
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. Finally, I also teach poetry workshops on embodiment, disability, and Tarot poetics, and recently taught a hybrid-format queer poetics workshop at Poets House in NYC.
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.
My pedagogy and academic work also centers disability/chronic illness, as I’ve been coping with chronic pain since 2014. I have hypermobile spectrum disorder (HSD)/hEDS, mild/moderate myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS), and debilitating chronic pain, in addition to complex-PTSD and autism; these disabilities have deeply affected my daily routines and my approach to teaching.
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:
Jesse Rice-Evans 