Kirklighter, Cristina (C.) 1959-

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KIRKLIGHTER, Cristina (C.) 1959-

PERSONAL:

Born June 3, 1959, in Takoma Park, MD; daughter of Marshall J. (an engineer) and Hilda S. (a homemaker; maiden name, Pinel) Cain; married Matthew T. Kirklighter (an air force officer), June 13, 1981 (deceased); children: Madeline. Ethnicity: "Hispanic." Education: Attended University of Kentucky, 1981; Valdosta State University, M.A., 1990; University of South Florida, Ph.D., 1990.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Texas A & M University, Corpus Christi, TX 78412-5503. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Tampa, Tampa, FL, assistant professor of English, 1998-2002; Texas A & M University at Corpus Christi, assistant professor of English, 2002—. Tampa College, adjunct instructor, 1991-92; also teacher at University of South Florida and Hillsborough Community College. Ad Hoc Committee on the Use of Students and Student Writing in Composition Research, member.

MEMBER:

Conference on College Composition and Communication (cochair), Hispanic Professional Women's Association.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Florida Center Writing Award for Distinguished Scholarship, 1997.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Cloe Vincent and Joseph Moxley, and contributor) Voices and Visions: Refiguring Ethnography in Composition, Boynton/Cook Publishers (Portsmouth, NH), 1997.

Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 2002.

Contributor to books, including The Personal Narrative: Writing Ourselves As Teachers and Scholars, edited by Gil Haroian-Guerin, Calendar Island Publishers, 1999; and The Relevance of English, edited by Robert Yagelski and Scott A. Leonard, National Council of Teachers of English (Urbana, IL), 2002. Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including College Composition and Communication, Americas Review, Lamar Journal of Humanities, Composition Forum, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and Text and Performance Quarterly.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A research project, "Collaboratively Mentoring Our Identities As Readers, Writers, and Teachers: A Black Cuban, Black American's Impact on a South Texas Community"; research on mixed-identity issues within personal writings.

SIDELIGHTS:

Cristina Kirklighter told CA: "As both a rhetoric/composition and contemporary literature professor, I am keenly aware of my contemporary audience and of my need for persuasive language to involve them in a particular vision at that writing moment. I write because I have a tendency to want to relate with others and add to an ongoing conversation in my scholarship through accessible and creative academic writing. Both my academic books have been described as readable and accessible. I take great pride in those descriptions because it means that I am a writer and not just an academic writer.

"I see writing as a never-ending exploratory process that creates more questions than answers. The journey to more questions is what motivates my writing and why I continue doing it. This is why I enjoy writing essays in that it represents a writing form that allows me to explore and digress if need be to make connections in unlikely places. I especially like to make historical personal journeys and help readers see the contemporary side of long-ago authors who they may have dismissed as out of touch with today's world. In my last work, many of my Latino/a colleagues who read my book said that they saw value in the sixteenth-century French essayist, Michel de Montaigne, the father of the essay. I hope this will be true for the canonical scholars of the essay who will hopefully find connections between Montaigne and today's nontraditional essayists. Writing about both traditional and nontraditional essayists of today and yesterday in the same book helps scholars break down barriers of these writers, rather than create them. Essay scholarship has a reputation of being too canonical and traditional. My works are devoted to opening up this canon to other voices, while still acknowledging and even appropriating tradition for contemporary society."