Carmen Kynard, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English, St. John’s College
Director, First-Year Writing Program, Institute for Writing
Studies
Ph.D. in Teaching and Learning/English Education, New York
University, 2005
kynardc@stjohns.edu
If you are someone who transacts with Graffiti, you will read my
name to the right: C-A-R-M-E-N. “Tito’s Style” (1996) was taught to
me (as best I could get it) by one of my former ninth grade
students in the Bronx, NY and today serves to remind me to always
ask: how, when, and why do the sophisticated aesthetic and
intellectual histories of students of color get so routinely
discarded in educational and pedagogical norms?
In my classes, I approach writing in a way that pays attention
to students like “Tito” and their sociocultural ways of knowing,
their own ways with words, their “Talkin and Testifyin”, and their
“Bum Rush [of] the Page”. I attempt to move beyond institutional
“psychologies” and “mechanics” so that my students and I can engage
writing and literacies as part of the attitudes, stances, and
consciousness that allow us to intervene in oppressive social
contexts.
My current research and published scholarship can be summarized
via four, central themes: Situated Histories of African American
Literacies; Race and Critical Pedagogies; Writing Studies and
African American/Pan-African Discourses; Black Women’s Essayist
Traditions and Discourses of Work and Life. With these themes and
“Tito’s Style” in mind, I work as an interdisciplinary scholar of
literacy and composition studies to interrogate the ways that
racialized political economies---from teacher recruitment to
assessment discourses--- get expressed in writing instruction in
secondary and post-secondary settings.