Faculty & Staff
Kara Dorris
Kara Dorris has been teaching composition, literature, creative writing, and technical writing classes since 2006. Although it may sound risky or paradoxical, disobedience is the foundation of her teaching philosophy because it demands awareness, failure, empathy, and vulnerability. In "The Poetics of Disobedience," Alice Notley asks us to stay open to everything and all possibilities, to then question what we see and experience in order to provide fuller access to ourselves and to the world, and to create connections between the two. The key to Notley’s idea of poetic disobedience is inquisitive awareness.
Dr. Dorris believes the point of education is not simply to acquire knowledge, but to be aware enough to question, to choose what we pay attention to and how we construct meaning and assign value from experience. Awareness is an act of disobedience, especially when information is handed out via filters rooted in our social media and search history.
To promote awareness as disobedience and build empathy, she designs her classes to encourage dialogue and engage basic human concerns and failures, reflecting on how we find and create meaning in life and literature.
Dr. Dorris' love for poetry and writing allowed me to further my love for writing. I never really was a fan of poetry because I was always taught to find one meaning behind it, but Dr. Dorris opened up my mind to help me understand that there are hundreds of meanings to any one poem because each reader will interpret it differently. I really liked the books she chose for her class because they were interesting, fun, and easy to connect to, which made for better understanding and reads! Overall, I loved her class because I wasn't afraid of being an author and writing what I wanted to without hesitation or negative criticism.
When Dr.Dorris teaches, she is able to reduce your stress levels because of how calm, relaxing, and flexible she is. I never feel stress or anxiety when her class starts!
Thanks to Dr. Dorris, I've read forms and cultural genres of writing I never expected to study in an English classroom! Her personal, outside knowledge of the publishing world is invaluable, and her poetry and fiction workshops always introduced me to new ways to hone my crafts without the fear of losing my style.