Michelle Petty-Grue

Michelle Petty-Grue

Assistant Teaching Professor

Affiliated Major

Michelle Grue’s interdisciplinary research in Education and Writing draws on Black feminism to investigate diversity issues in academia, creative writing, and in digital writing. She is currently joining a CCCC grant on race and writing classroom feedback. Her dissertation project focuses on the official and unofficial ways graduate students learn how to research race and gender in Writing and Rhetoric doctoral programs. Michelle has been teaching for the UCSB Writing Program since 2016 and for CCS for the last year as the Writing and Literature Fellow. She is happy to be using the Bachelors of Arts in Creative Writing she earned at Pepperdine University. She earned her MA at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara and will defend her PhD in 2020, from the same program. She is pleased to join the CCS faculty full-time as an Assistant Teaching Professor.
 
Her recent academic publications include an article in the Journal of Multimodal Rhetoric that explores the rhetorical performances in the dress practices of Black women professors and an essay about Afrofuturism as a frame and resource for literacy instruction. Two of her recent creative publications include "Cotton and Coconut," a poem about race and motherhood in the US and "Mercy" (see Issue 1), a short story about Black mermaids and the TransAtlantic Slave Trade she is developing into a novel.