Faculty

Tory Adkisson

Tory Adkisson is the author of The Flesh Between Us (SIU Press 2021), winner of the Crab Orchard Series Open Book Competition. His poems have appeared widely in journals such as Third Coast, Crazyhorse, Adroit Journal, Boston Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University and previously taught writing at the University of Georgia and Seattle City Colleges before coming to UC Berkeley.

Michelle Baptiste

Michelle Baptiste, an applied linguist, has been teaching writing at UC Berkeley College Writing Programs since 2002. She specializes in teaching culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse classes of developing writers. Her passion is supporting students to cultivate their own unique voice and develop a repertoire of voices they can access as they write across genres. She enjoys supporting students as they revise, design, and publish multimodal pieces online and encourages students to conduct interviews as part of their research process. In her own research to earn her MA in English...

Sean Burns

Sean Burns has been a Bay Area based educator, writer, and musician for 28 years. His scholarship and teaching focus on U.S. social movement history, critical theory, and California counterculture. Before joining the College Writing faculty, he served as Director of Berkeley’s Office of Undergraduate Research & Scholarship (2015-2021). In this role, Burns helped organize the campus wide Discovery Initiative and became the founding Director of the undergraduate Discovery Hub...

Carmen Acevedo Butcher

Carmen's translation of the spiritual classic Practice of the Presence released August 2022 from Broadleaf Books: https://linktr.ee/carmenacevedobutcher.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher (she / her) has a Ph.D. from The University of Georgia, Phi Beta Kappa. She has been fortunate her entire life to have been in class with brilliant teachers who collaborate with students. John Algeo, Margie Carroll, Wilson Hall, Paulina E. Buhl Noble, Frank Warnke, and Dot Whitfield were models for kindness, research, writing...

Caroline Cole

A native of Chicago, Caroline Cole has earned a B.A. in English and Rhetoric, an M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction, and a Ph.D. in Writing Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has taught courses in introductory and advanced composition, business communication, technical writing, desktop publishing, and expository writing with an emphasis in Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines.

In 1997, she joined the faculty of College Writing Programs at the University of California, Berkeley. Two years later, she created, launched, and...

Chisako Cole

Chisako teaches Reading & Composition courses (R1A and R4B) and has also taught in the Summer English Language Studies program and in the Summer Bridge Program, with a particular focus on multilingual student writers. Chisako holds an M.A. from Columbia University, and a B.A. from Boston University. Prior to relocating to California, she taught at New York University and The City University of New York. At Berkeley, she has been a Lecturer Teaching Fellow, focusing her work on the social rules of classroom discourse and composition for international students. She was accepted into the...

Teri Crisp

Teri Crisp has an M.A. in international studies from the University of Washington and did Ph.D. coursework in education at UC Berkeley, where she received an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award in the College Writing Programs. Certified in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), she has trained teachers in San Francisco, Prague, and Hong Kong. She teaches courses for multilingual student writers, and Reading & Composition courses that encourage collaborative research, critical thinking, and writing on ecology, art, and social values and policy.

Joe De Quattro

Joe De Quattro is an American fiction writer and 2023 nominee for The Best American Short Stories. He has new fiction, "Following Calvino", forthcoming in the Summer 2024 issue of Italian Americana, a peer-reviewed journal founded in 1974 and published by University of Illinois Press. His short stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines including Bayou Magazine, Beloit Fiction Journal, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review. He has an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College.

John Fielding

A longtime Cal Bear, John's time at UC Berkeley extends back to the 80's when he earned a BA in English. This was followed by a PhD in English and numerous composition and literature classes taught as a Graduate Student and Lecturer. Over the years, John has extended his specialization from 20th century British and American literature to include crime fiction, prison literature, as well as social and restorative justice topics. In addition to City College of San Francisco and Oakland's Laney College, John has most recently taught college research and writing San Quentin State Prison...

Donnett Flash

Donnett Flash has an M.A. in political science from UC Berkeley, and did coursework toward a Ph.D. in political science at Berkeley, as well - she was awarded an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award for her work in that department. For UC Berkeley’s College Writing Programs, she teaches Reading & Composition courses and public speaking. For many years she taught writing and political science courses in African-American Studies and Political Science, also at UC Berkeley. In addition, she teaches at the City College of San Francisco and Laney College. Donnett particularly...