Hi everyone! I’m Dr. Wilkey, and let me to you a bit about myself. I was born in Cincinnati, moved to Denver when I was seven, and at the age of fourteen, my family and I moved to Arizona where I went to high school and college. After college, I spent time in Detroit and Chicago, going to graduate school and engaging in community organizing work before coming to NKU in 2003 to become a faculty member in the English department. Needless to say, I seem to have come full circle with my move back to the Cincinnati area.
Much of my teaching places front and center the ways in which academic and public writing intersect with the work of community activism and social justice movements more generally. In particular, I set out to co-design community-based writing opportunities and activist research projects alongside neighborhood people and workers invested in the work of social justice. I do my community engagement work in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, where I collaborate with a number of Over-the-Rhine community organizations on projects related to activism and rhetoric. I am co-founder of the Over-the-Rhine Community Writing Collaborative, a partnership between Peaslee Neighborhood Center in Over-the-Rhine and NKU’s Department of English. While housed at Peaslee, the Collaborative promotes writing activities that honor and celebrate the voices of Over-the-Rhine residents and workers that have often been denied a space in public discourse and policy-making.
I have published a variety of scholarly articles on community-based learning, writing, and social action. In all my courses, I hope to help students develop and hone their research and literacy skills so that they feel more comfortable writing for college and public audiences outside the university. I guess you could say that I think it is really important that students learn to make connections between their academic work and the world beyond the university. I presently live in Cincinnati with my partner and two cats.
