Emily Rónay Johnston

Dr. Emily Rónay Johnston (she/her/hers) has been teaching in higher education since 2004—from the permafrost-laden Alaskan Interior and the high desert valley of Reno, Nevada, to the prairielands of Central Illinois, the ocean bluffs of San Diego, and California’s fertile Central Valley. Across climates (geographic and cultural), Emily has developed research and teaching practices around using writing to end all forms of violence. She firmly believes in writing as a tool for telling our stories, cultivating agency, thinking in community with others, and resisting oppression. Emily has taught courses in composition, rhetoric, composition pedagogy, English for multilingual writers, creative writing, ethnic studies, film, and gender and sexuality studies. She has published articles on the relationship between writing and adversity, as well as the restorative promises of writing pedagogy, in College Composition and Communication (2023), Writers: Craft & Context (2022), Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (2020), and elsewhere, and in the edited collections Systems Shift: Creating and Navigating Change in Rhetoric and Composition Administration (2023) and Composing Feminist Interventions: Activism, Engagement, Praxis (2018) published by University Press of Colorado. Press 254 published a chapbook of her poetry and photography called Meditations on Leaving (2017). Her current book project, Mending Wounds: Centering Resilience in First-Year Composition, charts a course for writing studies to teach student-writers the rhetorical flexibility needed to navigate a "post"-pandemic world. Emily holds a PhD in English Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Illinois State University, an MFA in Poetry from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and a BA in Women’s & Gender Studies from the University of California, Davis.