Kara Mae Brown Joins the Writing Program

Kara Mae Brown joins the Writing Program and the College of Creative Studies serving as Program Coordinator of the CCS’s new Writing and Literature major. She received her B.A. in English from The Ohio State University in 2003, and her MFA from Emerson College in Boston, MA in 2009. She has been teaching writing for eight years; the past six at Northeastern University, where she also served as the Director of First Year Writing.

Kara Mae’s research interests make her the perfect person in establishing a beneficial partnership between the Writing Program and the College of Creative Studies. Her research interests include teaching with technology, e-portfolios, comics, first-year writing curricula, and creative writing pedagogy. These interests are reflected in her intermediate and advanced courses in composition and creative writing, as well as in her published work. Kara Mae writes short fiction and nonfiction that has been published in places like Santa Clara Review, Summerset Review, Bluestem Review, and Word Riot.  She also has what she calls a “weird hobby.” As she notes, she has “a bit of a ship obsession” and she takes photos of tankers, which can be seen on the website, marinetraffic.com. So you might catch her at the harbor, camera in hand.  

Maritime culture aside, Kara Mae’s interest in online teaching ties in with her most recent research on online peer review.  Her work with e-portfolios is demonstrated in her most recent publication, "Regarding the "E" in E-Portfolios for Teacher Assessment," which is featured in Amy Dayton's collection Assessing the Teaching of Writing: Twenty-First Century Trends and Technologies. She has also presented her work at many major conferences. Her recent presentations include: "Peer Review Pedagogy for First-Year Writing and Online Courses" at the Boston-Area Rhetoric and Writing Network Summer Institute in 2015, and "Entering the Multiverse: Using Comics to Explore Multiliteracies, Multigenres, Multimodality, and Multilingualism in the FYC Classroom" at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 2015

Kara Mae’s most recent creative publications include: "What the Star Told Me" in the Santa Clara Review; "Superstition" in Bluestem Review and "Martha Paints the Sunset," forthcoming in Glint Literary Review.

Kara Mae is excited for the new school year and is looking forward to working with her new colleagues across campus on the new Writing and Literature Program in CCS, teaching the “amazing bunch of students in the Writing Program,” and perhaps most importantly: “Not trudging through 8 feet of snow to get to class.” 

 

 

 

 

Kara Mae Brown