Carmen Kynard, Ph.D.

Carmen Kynard is the Lillian Radford Chair in Rhetoric and Composition and Professor of English at Texas Christian University. Before TCU, she worked in English and Gender Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice as well as English, Urban Education, and Critical Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She interrogates race, Black feminisms, AfroDigital/Black languages and cultures, and the politics of schooling with an emphasis on composition, rhetoric, and literacies studies. Carmen has taught high school with the New York City public schools/Coalition of Essential Schools, served as a writing program administrator, and worked as a teacher educator. She has led numerous professional development projects on language, literacy, and learning and has published in Harvard Educational Review, Changing English, College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition, Reading Research Quarterly, Literacy and Composition Studies and more. Her award-winning book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies makes Black Freedom a 21st century literacy movement. Her current projects focus on young Black women and gender-expansive folx in college, Black Feminist rhetorics, and anti-racist/anti-colonial pedagogies. For more information about and access to her publications, click here.  To see a listing of the courses she teaches, click here.

Carmen co-edited the inaugural journal run of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture and maintains numerous digital projects including: 1)  Black Feminist Pedagogies .Com: Open Graduate Coursework Towards an Anti-Racist/ Intersected/ Black Feminist University, 2) Funkdafied: An Open Digital Space Dedicated to Learning about Black Literacies, Black Rhetorics, and Resistance, 3) Digi Rhetorics: Digital Justice/ Digital Rhetorics and Digital Blackness, 4) a digital project in collaboration with Dr. April Baker-Bell on the Black Language Syllabus, 5) BlackWomenRhetProject.Com: Classroom Collections on Intersectionality and Black, and 6) a digital project and symposium in collaboration with the Communities Literacies Collaboratory called Tracing the Stream.Com: A Black Feminist Digital Workspace. 

Carmen traces her research and teaching at her website, “Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions” (http://carmenkynard.org) which has garnered over 2 million hits since its 2012 inception.

Selected Publications

• Craig, Todd and Carmen Kynard. “Sista Girl Rock: Women of Color and Hip Hop Deejaying as Raced/Gendered Knowledge and Language.” reprinted in Todd Craig's "K for the Way": DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies

• Kynard, Carmen. “'Oh No She Did NOT Bring Her Ass Up in Here with That!' Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures." College English, vol 85, no 4, 2023, pp. 318-345. (winner of 2023 Richard Ohmann Award)

• Kynard, Carmen. "Fakers and Takers: Disrespect, Crisis, and Inherited Whiteness in Rhetoric-Composition Studies." Composition Studies, vol 50, no 3, 2022, pp. 131–136.

• Kynard, Carmen. “Black Digital-Cultural Imaginations: Black Visuality and Aesthetic Refuge in the M4BL Classroom.” Enculturation.net, https://enculturation.net/black_digital_culture_imaginations, 24 Mar 2022.

• Kynard, Carmen. “‘Chile, A Fox Be Just a Fox’: Black Girlhood Narratives as Rhetorical and Curricular Intervention in College Instruction.” Purposeful Teaching and Learning in Diverse Contexts: Implications for Access, Equity and Achievement. Eds., Darrell Hucks, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Victoria Showunmi, Suzanne C. Carothers, Chance W. Lewis.  Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing (part of series: Contemporary Perspectives on Access, Equity, and Achievement edited by Chance W. Lewis), 2022. 387-397.

• Kynard, Carmen.  “‘Troubling the Boundaries’ of Anti-Racism: The Clarity of Black Radical Visions amid Racial Erasure." WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol 44, no 3, 2021, 185–192.

• Kynard, Carmen. “‘Pretty for a Black Girl’: AfroDigital Black Feminisms and the Critical Context of ‘Mobile Black Sociality.’” Mobility Work in Composition. Eds Eds. Bruce Horner, Megan Faver Hartline, Ashanka Kumari, and Laura Sceniak Matravers. Logan, Utah: Utah University Press, 2021. 82-94.

• Kynard, Carmen. “'All I Need Is One Mic': A Black Feminist Community Meditation on the Work, the Job, and the Hustle (& Why So Many of Yall Confuse This Stuff)." Community Literacy Journal 14.2 (2020): 5-24.  (Selected for “The Best of Independent Composition and Rhetoric Journals 2021")

• Kynard, Carmen.  “Black as Gravitas: Reflections of a Black Composition Studies.”  Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal 2 (2020).  https://sparkactivism.com/volume-2-call/vol-2-intro/black-as-gravitas/

• Baker-Bell, April, Bonnie J. Williams-Farrier, Davena Jackson, Lamar Johnson, Carmen Kynard, Teaira McMurtry.  “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/demand-for-black-linguistic-justice

• "Administering While Black: Black Women's Labor in the Academy and the 'Position of the Unthought.'" In Black Perspectives on Writing Program Administration (Vol. Studies in Writing and Rhetoric, pp. 28-50). Urbana, IL: NCTE. 2019.

Coming soon....

Black/Queer/Intersectional/Abolitionist/Feminist: Essay-ish on the "Deep Sightings" of Black Feminisms during Shock-and-Awe Campaigns of White Supremacy"

“Free to Be Black As Hell”: Decolonial Refusal, Black Writing Lives, and the Legacies of CUNY’s Anti-Blackness