2012 Graduate, Ph.D. in Creative Writing - Fiction
Dr. DeMisty D. Bellinger, who earned her Ph.D. in creative writing in 2012, is an associate professor at Fitchburg State University in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Her debut novel New to Liberty, which originated in her creative dissertation, was published last year and received a “Book of the Day” recommendation from the New York Public Library. The novel, told in three parts, follows three women, living decades apart in the same area of rural Kansas, in their pursuits of agency, growth, and love.
In addition to her fiction, Dr. Bellinger has written two volumes of poetry, Rubbing Elbows and Peculiar Heritage, published in 2017 and 2021, respectively. She is also a poetry editor at Malarkey Books and an alumni reader for Prairie Schooner.
What are you currently most excited about in your professional life?
I’m excited about being in a position where I am able to offer influence to students and up-and-coming writers, both at AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) and here at Fitchburg State University. That’s exciting to me.
But as far as writing goes, I haven’t been writing much lately, and it’s partly because I have a four-four teaching load. I started writing a story that’s swimming in voodoo and history, so that’s a lot of fun, when I get back to it.
And you write both prose and poetry?
I studied fiction at the University of Nebraska, and I came into poetry much later. I got this job, which was for a fiction writer who may be able to teach poetry, and then when I came, the poet left because of citizenship issues. He was invited back, but he decided to stay in Canada. So I felt obliged to write and publish poetry, and so I started with poetry really as I was teaching the poetry classes.
The way that I entered poetry is through persona and through storytelling, because that’s where I feel more comfortable—in fiction. I love reading poetry, and I love writing it. It’s fun to write. I love teaching it, especially to students who are very reluctant. Most of my students are undergraduate students—In fact, this is the first year I’m teaching graduate-level students!— and students find out that poetry is not what they assumed it to be. I don’t know what happens to them in K-12, because I think some of the first literature that we’re exposed to is poetry—through nursery rhymes and whatnot—and something happens where we’re forced to look at poetry in a particular way and aren’t able to deviate from that.
What was your favorite class or your favorite project at UNL?
I first took a fiction workshop with Judy Slater, and I fell in love with her immediately, her very quiet way of guiding a workshop. She was not controlling at all, she was never insulting, so I enjoyed that class and writing with her, and she eventually became my adviser.
Because I did not come in with funding, and I did not have a teaching assistantship, for those first two years, I asked to intern in one of her (Slater’s) classes. It was twentieth century lit, and she taught it through the lens of the American dream, which I loved because I’m really into working class fiction. And just being in that classroom and learning how to teach by watching as an observer, and sometimes I led class discussion. I developed my comprehensive exam reading list, my focus, in that class, which was working class fiction. So I think that was my favorite long-term project, which is not creative writing, but it speaks to my writing in many ways. A couple of the books that I read from that project inspired the novel that I eventually would write in Timothy Schaffert’s class.
Which UNL professors had an especially positive influence on you?
I would say both Judy Slater and Timothy Schaffert. They both believed in my writing immediately. Judy told me that I had a very distinctive style, and no one has ever said anything remotely similar. People have said they liked my writing in the past, of course; otherwise, I wouldn’t have gone to grad school for it. But that was something specific that I could hang onto and lean into. And I think the same with Professor Schaffert. He is one of the people who got me to this place in life. [...]
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2015 Graduate, M.A. in Composition and Rhetoric
A 2015 graduate of the master’s program in composition and rhetoric, Dr. Ashanka Kumari is an assistant professor and the doctoral coordinator at Texas A&M University – Commerce. Areas of specialization in her research and teaching include first-generation-to-college graduate students, graduate student professionalization, multimodal composition and pedagogy, and the intersections among identity studies, digital literacies, and popular culture.
Dr. Kumari also serves as a Reviews section editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, the associate copy editor for enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, and is the inaugural recipient of the faculty Inclusive Excellence Champion award at Texas A&M University–Commerce.
What are you most excited about in your research and teaching?
A lot of my research is in graduate study, graduate programs; that’s what I’m interested in. My dream job was to be director of graduate studies, and now I am—I’m the doctoral coordinator. […] My dissertation actually was about the stories of first-generation-to-college doctoral students’ experiences. I ended up interviewing 22 first-generation doctoral students, because it's one thing to get a bachelor’s degree, but then, to keep going and get your master’s and Ph.D.—what leads to that? What is it like to be a first-gen person who goes through the Ph.D. and then goes into academia, or non-academia, but I think that almost all of my participants went into academia, which is a really interesting population. And what do we (first-generation graduate students) offer to our academic spaces that maybe a non-first-gen student or somebody else can’t do?
A lot of what I do in my graduate seminars is spend time talking about the structures and systems in grad school, here are things you can do, and here’s where your specific skillset or background is valued, why that matters, and how you can connect with students that way. And for a while I was the director of writing, so I would talk a lot with the teachers about that.
I often tell my story in the classroom. I always make the joke: English wasn’t my first language, it wasn’t my second language, it was my third language, and I have a Ph.D. in it. And here I am, teaching English, which—we’re not teaching the basics of the English language; that’s not what I do—but I like having that talk with students, because students always have this wide-eyed look, like, “Wait a second, you can do this and not be a perfect English speaker?” And I’m like, “Absolutely, of course you can; you can do whatever you want. It's the dream, but it depends on how you apply your background.”
We talk about immigrant narratives or social justice and diversity and inclusion and all these other topics. I think it comes up naturally, because I'm like, this is who I am. I'm putting it on a plate for you, to a certain comfort level, and they get to know me more throughout the semester. Then my students often will share little bits about themselves, like, “I'm also the first in my family to get a college degree, I never thought about that before.” And I’m like, “Mm-hmm,” and then they all realize that most of them in the room are the first. And I’m like, “We’re a university with a heavy first-generation population, and that’s a term, and here are some of the challenges that come with that term, like imposter phenomenon.” So we end up talking really frankly about, like, do you ever feel like you don’t belong in a space? And they’re like, “Yeah, we feel that all the time.”
Then we have those conversations in the classroom that I think are really valuable, that I wish I’d had more of in my own education. I think that’s a really valuable thing that first-generation people bring to the classroom. Something I wrote about in my dissertation was that a lot of times this population gets talked about as a deficit. Like, that they’re going to have struggles—the most common word is “struggles”—like, “the struggles of first-generation students include challenges fitting into academia, financial struggles, and more.” And I'm like, okay, but what do we do with this information? What does this population bring to this space, rather than, what hinders this population? I think that’s something that we (people in leadership roles in the educational system) can do better. […]
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