Nancy DeJoy came to MSU in 2006 as the Director of First-Year Writing; her main contribution at that time was curriculum revision and teacher training. Her goal is always to shift education toward participation (as opposed to consumption) and contribution (as opposed to adaptation) in ways that open spaces for inclusion and equity. She is the author of Process This: Undergraduate Writing in Composition Studies and co-editor, with Beatrice Smith, of Collaborations & Innovations: Supporting Multilingual Writers Across Campus Units.

Her recent articles include “Imagining the Emotive Power of the Poetic Word: Multi-layered, Multi-faceted Images as Pathways for Understanding Our Singular and Collective Lives,” co-authored with Samantha Earley (International Journal of the Image. 11.3. 73-93) and “Something Other than Remembering: Memoir as Process.” (Fourth Genre: 22.2, 2020. 225-228). Nancy is an installation poet, who is known for creating projects that include poetry in public art movements. Her creative work focuses on art for social justice, especially the ways that rhetorics of public art and practices of poetic listening can open pathways to social justice.

She is the faculty advisor to Canvas Community, a registered student organization that provides art classes to public schools and not-for-profit organizations; she is also the faculty advisor to ReCur, the undergraduate research journal.

Nancy is one of three PIs on a Mellon Foundation “Just Futures” grant titled “Creativity in the Time of COVID 19: Art as a Tool for Equity and Social Justice” ($3,074,000.00), a three-year project that focuses on the ways that people disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic use creativity (https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2021/redefining-art-covid19). The project ends in a major exhibit of the creative artifacts we collect coinciding with the 2023 Capital City Film Festival (Nancy is the Poet in Residence for the CCFF). 

Thank you, Nancy, for your involvement in WRAC and your commitment to your students!