New Writing Faculty fall 2019

September 2, 2019

The Writing & Rhetoric Program welcomes Heidi Nobles and Cheryl Pallant. 

Heidi Nobles, Assistant Professor, General Faculty, Associate Director of Writing Across the Curriculum 

As a rhetoric and writing scholar, Heidi Nobles focuses on the ways in which text editors shape finished products—and the ripple effects of those changes in authors, readers, and communities. She has worked as a book editor for academic and commercial publishers for the past fifteen years, collaborating with other scholars, authors, and publishers on shaping ideas and manuscripts toward social ends. Her research blends the past with the present by recovering historical editorial praxis (primarily in the Classical era, in conjunction with rhetorical history) while also documenting current praxis in locations including publishing houses, writing centers, and libraries.

Nobles’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Advances in the History of Rhetoric, WLN Journal, Scholarly Editing, Computers and Composition Online, and the South Atlantic Review. She has also worked on extended grant-funded veterans research, including serving as site coordinator for an NEH summer institute and editing multiple years’ worth of conference proceedings for preservation in the host institution’s digital repository. Professionally, she has written for a variety of nonprofit groups focused on poverty intervention, refugee resettlement, higher education, and community publishing. She is currently revising her dissertation project into both article and book manuscript form. That project was originally titled Editing Culture: The Rhetorical Work of Textual Editing as Shaping Collective Memory and Social Action.

Nobles earned her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Texas Christian University (2018), her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Carolina (2011), and her MA in English Literature from Baylor University (2006). As UVA’s Associate Director of Writing Across the Curriculum, Nobles will work with schools, departments, and programs outside of English, by helping to design curriculum that incorporates writing as a means of improving student understanding, achievement, and retention. This fall, she will be teaching two sections of “Writing and Critical Inquiry,” under the title “Writing Material: A Scientific Approach to Artful Communication.” The course emphasizes material research and writing methods that bridge the arts and sciences in order to encourage fresh student perspectives on writing activity.

Cheryl Pallant, Lecturer 

Cheryl Pallant is an award winning author, poet, dancer, and healer. Her twelve books span poetry, nonfiction, memoir, and short fiction. Most recently released is Writing and the Body in Motion: Awakening Voice through Somatic Practice (McFarland and Company, 2018), a nonfiction books that discusses the intersection of writing with body awareness, Ginseng Tango (Big Table Publishing, 2017), her memoir about her time in South Korea, and Her Body Listening (Blaze Vox Books, 2017), a collection of poetry. Her book, Contact Improvisation: an Introduction to a Vitalizing Dance Form, is considered the primary book in the field. Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in numerous print and online magazines such as Fence, HOW2, Tarpaulin Sky, North Dakota Quarterly, and Oxford Magazine and anthologized in places like Introduction to the Prose Poem and Hope Beneath Our Feet. She has published over 200 reviews and interviews with writers, dancers, performance artists, and spiritual practitioners and was dance critic for a local newspaper for twelve years.

Forthcoming is a chapter on Zen, embodiment, dance, and evolutionary spirituality in Spiritual Herstories and an essay on the innovative poetry of George Quasha. She is at work on two poetry collections and a nonfiction book on consciousness, perception, and integrative awareness.

She received the Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts, was Finalist for the Virginia Books Award, the Southeastern Book Association, and the Bechtel Prize. She received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Richmond Arts Council.

Before joining University of Virginia, she taught at University of Richmond, University of Tulsa, and Keimyung University (in South Korea). She leads workshops on writing, poetry, contact improvisation, Writing From the Body, and meditation at schools, hospitals, and art and spirituality centers throughout the U.S. and abroad. She practices meditation, drawing from more than four decades of Transcendental Meditation, Tibetan Bon Buddhism, and Soto Zen, is certified in Reiki and Healing Touch, and is co-founder of Integral Meditation Group.

For Fall 2019, she is teaching Contemplative Somatic Writing.

Image: 
Homer Statue Old Cabell Hall