David A. Jolliffe

David A. Jolliffe is the initial holder of the Brown Chair in English Literacy at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where he is also Professor of English. Prior to coming to the University of Arkansas, Jolliffe taught at DePaul University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Texas at Austin, West Virginia University, Bethany College, and Wheeling Park High School in Wheeling, West Virginia. He has held visiting positions at Jilin University of Technology in the People's Republic of China and the American University in Cairo. At DePaul, Jolliffe was one of the original faculty members who taught for the Steans Center for Community-Based Service Learning, offering courses in urban literacy and tutoring in city schools. He is the author or editor of several books on the theory and practice of rhetoric and the preparation of writing teachers, and from 2003 to 2007, he served as Chief Reader for the Advanced Placement English Language and Composition Examination. You may reach Professor Jolliffe at djollif@uark.edu or 479-575-2289.

Click HERE to read David Jolliffe's CV. (This document requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to view. To download, click here.)

ARKANSAS DELTA ORAL HISTORY PROJECT DIRECTORS

Anne Pearson Raines

Born in the Arkansas Delta, Anne learned the rhythms of the land growing up in her hometown McGehee. Through many moves throughout Arkansas, Anne has always carried an appreciation for the beauty of a flat landscape. After graduating from Conway High School, Anne attended the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and a master’s degree in English Literature. Now serving as Associate Director for the Enhanced Learning Center at the University of Arkansas, Anne lives in Fayetteville with her husband and three children.

Krista M. Jones

Krista M. Jones is one of the Co-Directors for the Arkansas Delta Oral History Project at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where she is also a graduate student in history. Prior to her appointment as a Co-Director, Jones received her Bachelors of Arts degree in history for the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. While at Fayetteville, Jones was an Assistant Archivist for the Special Collections Department at Mullins Library. She is currently an active member of Phi Theta Kappa, Phi Alpha Theta, History Organization for Graduate Students, Golden Key, Arkansas Historical Association, and the National Scholars Honor Society. Jones’s academic studies focus on Southern American history with an emphasis on race relations, African American religion, and the Arkansas Delta.

Catherine Roth

Catherine Roth is a student in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas. She graduated in 2004 from the University of Alabama, Birmingham with Honors in English. While at UAB, she was awarded the Barksdale-Maynard Prize in Fiction and the Goldstein Howton Scholarship for Creative Writing. A native Texan, Catherine grew up in Selma, Alabama and Hope, Arkansas.

Laine Gates

Hailing from a long line of public school educators in El Dorado, Arkansas, Laine is the project assistant for the Arkansas Delta Oral History Project. She graduated in 2008 from the University of Arkansas Summa cum Laude in anthropology with a minor in Japanese. She is currently a student in the UA’s cultural anthropology M.A. program and an active member of Advocates for the Arkansas Delta and Students for a Free Tibet. Her academic research focuses on the anthropology of education, anthropology of the American South, medical anthropology, and arts education.

ASSOCIATED LITERACY PROFESSIONALS

Christian Z. Goering

Chris Goering received a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Kansas State University while teaching courses and supervising student teachers as a graduate teaching assistant under Dr. F. Todd Goodson. Goering also served as a co-director of Youth and Community Programs for the Flint Hills Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project while in Manhattan. He taught high school English and leadership courses while in Topeka, Kansas. His special interests are helping secondary level students become interested and engaged in writing and reading, using popular music as a motivational tool in the English/Language Arts classroom, and ultimately helping teachers develop literacies in their students.

Kassie Misiewicz

Kassie Misiewicz is a professional Theatre for Youth director and educator, and is currently the Executive Artistic Director of Tricycle Theatre for Youth, based in Bentonville, AR. She has created innovative curriculum and taught teachers and students all over the United States. Kassie is a founder and former Artistic Director of TheatreSquared, North West Arkansas’ professional theater and is now creating a new professional children’s theater in Bentonville, AR. Before moving to Arkansas, Kassie was the director of the Education Outreach program at the Seattle Children’s Theatre and Associate Artistic Director at First Stage Children’s Theater in Milwaukee. Kassie received her Masters of Fine Arts degree in Theatre for Young Audiences from Arizona State University and her BA in Theatre from the University of Notre Dame. She has taught and/or directed at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Arizona State University, Walton Arts Center, Growing Stage Theatre for young Audiences and the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival. She is a former executive board member of TYA/USA, the national service organization for youth theater professionals.

BROWN CHAIR INITIATIVE ADVISORY COMMITTEE:

Jim Allen is the Executive Director of the Ozark Literacy Council in Fayetteville. Jim has held this position for the past four years but has worked for nearly two decades in nonprofit administration and program development. Before moving to literacy, Jim worked in community-based service development for adults with developmental disabilities, with an emphasis on vocational training. Under Jim’s guidance, the Ozark Literacy Council has developed an innovative modular approach to meet the specific needs of the client.  Last year, the Council completed a pilot project with Pro Literacy to add online modules to the tutor-training curriculum via the Verizon Literacy Campus.

Deborah Brandt is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the social history of literacy including changing conditions for literacy learning and issues of access and reward for literacy. She is author of two books, Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts (Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), which won the National Council of Teachers of English David R. Russell Award for Distinguished Research; and Literacy in American Lives (Cambridge University Press, 2001), which won the Modern Language Association Mina P. Shaughnessy Award and the Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award. In 2003, she was awarded the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education ($200,000), which recognizes extraordinary scholarly and artistic achievement. She is at work at a new book, tentatively titled Writing Now: New Directions in Mass Writing, which traces the ascendancy of writing as a mass skill in the U.S. since about 1960. She is a former Visiting Scholar at the U.S. Department of Education and has held national offices with the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy and has served as a consultant for the National Assessment of Adult Literacy Writing Study. She has been active on her campus in the areas of affirmative action and student access and holds a number of teaching awards from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and service outreach awards from the Urban League of Greater Madison (Wisconsin) and the NAACP (Madison Branch).

Jo Davis is the Literacy Specialist for the Delta Academic Initiative, an organization based at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff designed to foster critical reading, discussion, writing, and revision among students in public schools in the Arkansas Delta. For the Initiative, Jo works with teachers in after-school academies and weekend workshops, emphasizing the DAI’s Four-Step Process: assessment, gap analysis, curriculum development, and instructional design. Jo holds a B.S.E. in History from Mississippi College, an M.A. in English with an emphasis in writing from the University of Memphis, and a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in creative writing from the University of Southern Mississippi.  She has taught at public and private high schools in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas and at Williams Baptist College in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, from 1992 to 2005.

Fitz Hill is the President of Arkansas Baptist College in Little Rock, 13th president in the college's 122- year history. Hill most recently served as the Executive Director of the Ouachita Opportunity Fund at Ouachita Baptist University of Arkadelphia. Hill is the co-founder and co-general manager of Life CHAMPS Sports, a youth sports program headquartered in Little Rock. He is the former head football coach of the San Jose State Spartans and served as assistant head football coach for the Arkansas Razorbacks under head football coach Houston Nutt from 1998 to 2000. Hill is a graduate of Ouachita Baptist University. He received a Master's degree in student personnel services from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, La., and a doctorate in Higher Education leadership from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1997. He also served in the military during Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and received the Bronze Star and Commendation Medal for services rendered.

Philip Less began teaching ESL with newly arrived adult immigrants in Miami, Florida in 1979. He moved to Colorado to pursue a graduate degree in ESL from Colorado State University in Fort Collins. In 1984, after he received his Master's degree, he moved to Little Rock, Arkansas to teach in the Intensive ESL Program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. During the next sixteen years, Dr. Less was an ESL teacher, Academic Coordinator, and Interim Director of the UALR program.  In 2000, Dr. Less worked on a special research project for Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, examining the language needs of adult Hispanic immigrants in the state of Arkansas. In February 2001, he became the state's first ESL Program Advisor for the Adult Education Section of the Arkansas Department of Workforce Education. In December 2003, Dr. Less received his Doctor of Education degree in Higher Education from UALR. Dr. Less has lived and worked in Massachusetts, Florida, Colorado, the Netherlands, Israel, and the former Yugoslavia, where he was a Fulbright Lecturer of English at the University of Zagreb in Croatia.

Dr. Beverly J. Moss is associate professor of English at The Ohio State and a member of the summer faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English in Middlebury, Vermont. Since 2001 she has directed the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing (CSTW) at Ohio State, which includes a writing center that offers students face-to-face and online writing tutorials, sponsors an undergraduate minor in professional writing, and provides support for instructors through the Writing Across the Curriculum program. CSTW’s outreach efforts promote literacy with partners that include P-12 schools, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and businesses. In addition to authoring a broad range of essays on literacy, ethnography, and the teaching of writing, Dr. Moss co-edited the collection Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom, authored A Community Text Arises: A Literate Text and a Literate Tradition in African American Churches, and edited the volume Literacy Across Communities. Dr. Moss has also served on the editorial boards of College Composition and Communication and Studies in Writing and Rhetoric. She just completed a term as the co-editor of the NCTE-Lawrence Erlbaum book series on Composition and Literacy. Dr. Moss earned her doctoral degree in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an M.A. degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, and bachelor’s degree from Spelman College.

Eli Goldblatt was born in 1952 in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up on Army posts in the U.S. and Germany. After earning his B.A. at Cornell University, he attended a year of medical school at Case-Western Reserve University. He taught high school science, math, and English for six years in Philadelphia. He traveled in Mexico and Central America in 1980, and completed an M.Ed. at Temple University in 1982. He finished a Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988. From 1990-96 he taught at Villanova University, and currently he is the University Writing Director and an associate professor of English at Temple University.

Goldblatt is both a compositionist and a poet. His literacy study is Round My Way: Authority and Double Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers (U of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); he has published in Writing on the Edge, College English, Linguistics and Education, and CCC on literacy autobiography, writing programs, and community-based learning. His recently completed book manuscript is Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy beyond the College Curriculum. In poetry, his work has appeared in literary journals such as Epoch, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Hambone, Louisiana Literature, Hubbub, 6ix, Ixnay Reader, and 88 since 1972. His book-length collections include Sessions 1-62 (Chax P, 1991), Speech Acts (Chax P, 1999), and Without a Trace (Singing Horse P, 2001). He has also published two children’s books and a verse play.

For over 20 years, Judy Fox has been working with young children and their families to help the children build foundations for life-long literacy. Judy holds a Bachelor of Education degree in Early Childhood Education and a Master of Education degree in Elementary Education from Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. She has taught Kindergarten and First Grade in Washington County, Maryland and has worked as a model teacher with all elementary grades. She has worked for many years in Hagerstown, Maryland as a Language Arts Curriculum and Instruction Specialist working in a professional development mode with those teaching Pre-Kindergarten, Kindergarten, First Grade, and Second Grade. Again, life-long literacy has been her passion in this capacity. Judy has worked with the Maryland State Department of Education - the Early Learning Division, to help with the implementation of Maryland ’s Model for School Readiness. She has also worked with Maryland State Department of Education in the writing of the state’s language arts curriculum for Pre-Kindergarten through Second Grade. She has taught several times for Penn State University and Hagerstown (MD) Community College, taking her love of teaching reading to both pre-service and in-service teachers. Judy has presented at the International Reading Association’s national conference and has been a presenter several times at SOMIRAC – State of Maryland International Reading Association Conference. Her last SOMIRAC presentation, “Intervention…a Plan, Not a Program”, has been a pivotal piece in the way reading interventions for struggling readers have evolved in her school system. She has helped to implement a system-wide writing initiative entitled “Every Day Writing”. She is currently working with the teachers concerning the role of vocabulary and background knowledge in early literacy acquisition and how these components impact life-long literacy. Judy continues her work as a Language Arts Curriculum and Instruction Specialist as a “trainer of trainers” working with school-based Student Achievement Specialists in twenty-six elementary schools in and around Hagerstown, Maryland. She may be reached at foxjud@wcboe.k12.md.us

Patti Williford is the Director of the Southwest Arkansas Migrant Education Cooperative, Hope, AR. She works with migrant families to help them set and reach literacy goals. Migrant children are at risk because of the nature of the migrant family lifestyle. Migrant Even Start programs work with community resources to provide support services that each family needs. Patti works with parents to set goals for increasing their personal literacy both in Spanish and English.  She works with preschool and school age children to increase their English literacy skills. She has worked with Hispanic families for more than twenty years.  She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Louisiana College, a Master of Religious Education from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a Spanish Language Certificate from the Spanish Language Institute in San Jose, Costa Rica. She has graduate training in counseling and is completing a Master of Curriculum and Instruction in ESL. After living and working in Peru, S.A. for 13 years she returned to the U.S. and began teaching.  She has taught in schools in Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas.  She writes on cross–cultural education and family issues for Nuestra Tarea magazine.