Academic Writing Examples

"How State Budget Cuts to University Funding Results in the Overall Increase of Class Disparity"

For an English Composition course, I was tasked with creating a fact sheet for a research project I was conducting concerning, "How State Budget Cuts to University Funding Results in the Overall Increase of Class Disparity".

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"The Wave: Should you fear it or fear being left out of it"

I wrote this piece for an English Composition course. I was tasked with researching the origins, history and cultural meanings of one word in English and then I had to create a story about it that tracks the word’s lexical change and explains the cultural significance of those changes.

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No You Cannot Touch It

I wrote this piece for an English Composition course. The assignment was to write an experimental translingual/code-meshing text. I chose to write in African American Vernacular English and Standard English. I strategically placed the different dialects in order to achieve a particular rhetorical effect upon my readers.

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Poetry Writing Examples

"Collection of Poetic Works: Dead Doves Rot if You Leave Them in the Sun Too Long

The collection includes 15 original works. Several were presented at the University of Pittsburgh hosted event, "Come in Love, Come in Pain". The works are heavily centered around the exploration of the connotations of light and dark as well as blackness and whiteness.

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Reasearch Writing Examples

"Black Female Perspective of “Diversity” Programs: Considerations of Hospitality on a College Campus"

This presentation explores the concept of hospitality via “inclusion” programs in relation to reported experiences of black women on predominately white college campuses. According to Khalilah Annette Shabazz (2015), targeted academic advising, mentoring, availability of a staff or faculty member, can all be considered part of institutional support programs related to inclusion. Through interviewing Black women in college-prep programs such as RISE and BRIDGES, I sought to understand how these programs work to support community-building for these women in particular.

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"H.Y.P.E. (Homewood Youth-Powered and Engaged) Media: Empower Youth to Change Their Community's Narrative"

This project will explore how black students can utilize social media in order to influence their community’s narrative. Through traditional means of ethnographic research such as conducting interviews, taking note of observations, keeping documentation as well as utilizing teacher-research methodologies through conducting workshops within the program and receiving direct data from the participants themselves, I seek to understand how these individuals in particular can communicate their thoughts and ideas about their community in order to facilitate change.

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