connie griffin, lecturer

Connie Griffin has committed her career to the exploration of self, story and society. She is particularly devoted to mentoring the process of creative self-expression, cross-cultural understandings and narrative self-representation.

Prior to joining UWW, Connie taught for many years in Boston College's Creative Nonfiction Writing Program, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, the Capstone Reflection Program and the Woods College of Advancing Studies. She has also taught in Curry College's Blue Hills Writing Institute, as well as more recently on the faculty of Commonwealth Honors College and the Journalism Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

She came to UWW with a particular interest in teaching and advising adult learners, as she was a nontraditional student herself, beginning her academic studies at Tulsa Junior College and transferring those credits to the University of Tulsa, where she supported her studies by working full-time as a college administrator in the University Relations Department until receiving a full scholarship her senior year. At that point she spent one semester in a college dorm, just to have the undergraduate experience. Connie says one semester was sufficient to provide all she needed to know about that.

educational background

B.A., University of Tulsa, English and American Literature, with concentrations in Communication and Creative Writing
M.A., Boston College, English and American Literature; Fellow in Creative Nonfiction
Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst, American Multicultural Literatures, Autobiographical Studies, Cultural Contexts and Self-Representation in Nonfiction Narrative

teaching and rearching interests

Connie’s teaching and research interests include autobiographical, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies. Her research explores representations of marginalized identities within multicultural contexts and the tension that exists between self and social representations of cultural identities. She is interested in storytelling in its many forms and in the role of narrative in furthering self-understanding, cultural literacy and cross-cultural dialogue in a globalized world.

publications

Connie's publications have appeared in Literature and the Writer (Rodopi Press) and He Said, She Says: An RSVP to the Male Text (Fairleigh Dickinson UP), as well as in a number of journals and literary magazines.

Her book, To Tell the Truth: Practice and Craft in Narrative Nonfiction (Pearson/Longman, 2009), provides guidance in writing memoir, profiles, prose poems, lyric essays, and literary journalism, as well as an anthology of essays by writers on writing and examples of narrative nonfiction.

draws inspiration from

Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened Sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world Than the breathing respect that you carry Wherever you go right now? Are you waiting For time to show you some better thoughts?

- William Stafford, "You Reading This, Be Ready"