Hi, I’m Erika Luckert (she/her). I’m an Assistant Professor and Director of Composition at the University of Southern Mississippi. My research focuses on writing pedagogies at the intersection of composition and creative writing, with an emphasis on social and collaborative practice. In my teaching, I aim not only to help my students grow as writers, but also to widen their understanding of the relationships, responsibilities, and communities that writing involves. As a writer, poetry continues to be a critical part of my practice, as well as a community that shapes my scholarship and pedagogy.
My research focuses on writing pedagogy at the intersection of creative writing and composition, with an emphasis on social and collaborative practice. Currently, I’m at work on a study of writing workshops.
“Entering the Room: Qualitative Research in Writing Workshops.” Forthcoming in Innovations in Creative Writing Studies Research: Methods, Methodologies, Practices. Peter Lang Press.
“Other Disseminations.” Recollections from an Uncommon Time: 4C20 Documentarian Tales. Studies in Writing and Rhetoric Series, Steve Parks, ed. CCCC/NCTE, 2023.
“The Gift of a Source.” Dynamic Activities for First-Year Composition. Michal Reznizki and David Coad, eds. NCTE, 2023.
“What is a Poem: Writing Towards a Wilder Definition of Poetry.” Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry. Ed. Matthew Burgess. New York, NY: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2019.
How else could this be? This question persists across my pedagogy, whether I am teaching first-year composition or creative writing, mentoring new teachers, or collaborating with colleagues across disciplines. It is a deeply political question—one that asks us, together, to rethink our initial assumptions, to resist our tendency to write into the status quo, and to imagine more diverse and expansive realities.
I teach my students to reimagine writing not as a solitary pursuit, but as a social practice, something that depends upon communities to develop and thrive. Together, we work to understand how our values and expectations of writing—whether “scholarly” or “creative”—are shaped by race, class, and other intersections of privilege and exclusion. In all my classes, I center opportunities for students to create knowledge together—whether through peer interviews, social annotations, or collective annotated bibliographies. In this way, I help my students to see writing as a socially engaged practice—something that is informed by their own communities, and that can form communities too.
