Biography

Karyn L. Smith is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of the Writing Center at Housatonic Community College. She earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in creative nonfiction, from the University of New Mexico. Her dissertation was a book-length manuscript of personal essays titled Leaving, with a critical preface examining the use of story structure in creative nonfiction. Her professional interests include writing across the curriculum, blurred genre boundaries, new media’s influence on language, code-switching, and re-positioning marginalized voices within the classroom.

Professor Smith creates a classroom environment where creative activities and assignments help students cultivate their voices and experience the joy of discovery. She wants her students to communicate their ideas about the world clearly and effectively, and to anticipate their audience and make choices so that they can best communicate in the situations they will encounter beyond the classroom. Her pedagogy emphasizes writing to learn, writing as a process, and writing as a series of choices in response to a given rhetorical situation.

Professor Smith lives with her husband, their son, a cat and a turtle, in a little house with bookshelves in every room.