Katherine Crowe

Katherine (Katie) Crowe is a second year PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition with interests in community literacies, queer rhetorics, and Black feminist pedagogies. They are additionally pursuing graduate certificates in Women and Gender studies and Comparative Race and Ethnic studies to support these interests, with an expected graduation date of 2030. Their primary pedagogical interests lie with writing centers and freshman composition courses. For them, centering critical literacy in their pedagogy and research on freshman composition curricula means engaging with cultural rhetorics, providing ample opportunities for students to explore their own voices and epistemologies as they construct their writerly identities, and creating opportunities to write toward a world structured through transformational and relational ways of being and knowing.

 

They graduated from the University of North Texas with a bachelor’s degree in literature in the spring of 2024, but what compelled them to pursue graduate study was their three years working in and studying the Writing Center at UNT and their time as online editor for the North Texas Review. In both of these spaces, they found opportunities to engage with writing and the teaching of writing as sites of queer possibility. Thus far, Crowe’s research has covered topics including linguistic and epistemic justice in the writing center, Queer counternarratives of authenticity in hip-hop, the selective literacies and appropriative histories that inform articulations of (white) girlhood on tumblr, and zines as a method for graduate instruction in Critical Latinx Education Studies. 

 

Crowe has presented their work on linguistic justice and critical literacy in the writing center twice at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing and the North Texas Writing Centers Association, and was accepted to present at the 2025 National Women’s Studies Association in Puerto Rico. As part of an interdisciplinary research team formed to study Zines in graduate education, they have additionally received acceptances for the 2025 Association for the Study of Higher Education, American Educational Studies Association, the Curriculum and Pedagogy Group(CP & CORYMI 2025) and 2026 American Educational Research Association conferences. This team is additionally working on a manuscript titled “Zine-ing Latindade: Zinemaking, Latinidades, and the Muxerista Pedagogical Possibilities with/ in the Graduate Classroom” wherein Crowe’s contribution concerns organizing a freshman composition course through the logic of a zine. Crowe is working on revisions for a manuscript developed out of their undergraduate honors thesis, tentatively titled “The Right to Meander: Centering Linguistic Justice in Writing Center Work” which critically reflects on the possibilities and constraints encountered while tutoring before and then through April Baker-Bell’s linguistic justice framework at a public institution in Texas.

 

Beyond the classroom, they write, produce, direct, and edit Writing Center of the Earth on Youtube, a work of speculative fiction about a group of tutors in a fictional writing center at the center of the earth. They have worked with community groups to organize free stores and to plant post oak saplings in service of a commitment to community involvement, and ecological literacy. You can find more information about their work at www.allthatwetouchwechange.org