Meet Keri Epps, Assistant Teaching Professor, Writing

Keri Epps is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Writing Program and an Academic and Community Engaged Faculty Fellow in the Pro Humanitate Institute. Since joining Wake Forest in Fall 2018, she has dedicated much of her teaching, research, and service to community writing. Serving as the vice-chair of the board of directors for the local nonprofit LEAD Girls of NC, Inc, Keri has co-designed a pilot literacy program for at-risk middle school girls to be implemented during the 2019-2020 academic year. Collaborating with Writing 111 students and members of a new student organization, Wake Women LEAD, Keri will design activities and mentor students each week at Winston-Salem Preparatory Academy in an after-school academic support program and facilitate a digital media workshop with Wake Forest students at the nonprofit’s inaugural girls’ conference, “Girls Rising,” in September 2019.  

In addition to Keri’s work in the community in Winston-Salem, she has co-authored scholarship on community engagement and graduate education, as seen in Community Literacy Journal and the 2018 edited collection Composing Feminist Interventions: Activism, Engagement, Praxis. Her other research, connected to activating and valuing community voices, is in rhetorical genre theory and media studies. Her dissertation, defended in May 2018, is titled Pens, Print, and Pixels: Gendered Writing and the Epistolary Genre in Transitional Eras and examines the genre of women’s letter writing at intersections of media transition—in manuscript, print, and digital media—to illuminate how women have used unlikely resources of genre and media to circumvent prescribed gender roles in letter writing. 

Keri is originally from the Fruitcake Capital of the World—Claxton, Georgia—and has moved across the Southeast—in Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and North Carolina—for her graduate degrees and now her first faculty position. She is an avid dog lover (mom to Lucy and Winston), kickboxing and hiking enthusiast, and activist. She looks forward to deepening personal and professional connections at Wake Forest and in the Winston-Salem community now that she has passed the one-year milestone.