Dr. Michelle Hall Kells

Translingual Literacy Studies Coordinator

Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies

mkells@unm.edu

https://www.michelle-kells.org/

Dr. Michelle Hall Kells is a professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico where she teaches graduate and undergraduate classes.  Kells’s story as a teacher spans over two decades exploring and engaging language, writing, and the ecology of relationships that we as writers constitute through our different texts. Kells research, teaching, and service projects coalesce around questions of belonging and environmental citizenship within and across diverse spheres (linguistically, socially, spatially, and textually).

Her research interests include public rhetoric (civil rights and environmental discourses), ethnolinguistic diversity, literacy education, and community writing studies.   Kells is lead editor of Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines (Heinemann, 1999) and Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy Education (Heinemann, 2004). Her work is featured in the journals TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, JAC, Written Communication, Journal of Reflections, Journal of Community Literacy, Praxis, and Rhetoric & Public Affairs as well as a number of edited books including Cross-Language Relations in Composition, Dialects; Englishes, Creoles, and Education; Who Belongs in America?: Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration.

 Kells is the author of Hector P. Garcia: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights (Southern Illinois University Press, 2006).  Her recent book release is Vicente Ximenes, LBJ’s “Great Society,” and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018). She recently released a new volume featuring K-16 Latina scholars co-edited with Laura Gonzalez (Assistant Professor University of Florida), Latina Leadership: Language and Literacy Education Across Communities (Syracuse University Press).