Karen Head
Adjunct Professor
Dr. Karen Head (Ph.D. University of Nebraska, M.A. University of Tennessee, B.A. Oglethorpe University, A.A. DeKalb College) was previously the Associate Chair and Professor in Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Media, and Communication and Executive Director of the Institute-wide Communication Center. She has been at Georgia Tech since 2004.
In 2020, she was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Fulton County, Georgia.
She is also the editor of Atlanta Review and the immediate past editor of Southern Discourse in the Center: A Journal of Multiliteracy and Innovation.
On a more unusual note, she is currently the Poet Laureate of Waffle House—a title that reflects an outreach program to bring arts awareness to rural high schools in Georgia, which has been generously sponsored by the Waffle House Foundation.
She has published five books of poetry (Lost on Purpose, Sassing, My Paris Year, On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year, and Shadow Boxes) and exhibited acclaimed digital poetry projects. Since 2006, she has been a Visiting Scholar at Technische Universität-Dortmund, Germany, where she serves as primary consultant for their academic tutoring center.
Her research focuses on higher education rhetoric, sustainable and innovative pedagogy and space design, communication theory and pedagogical practice, especially the implementation and development of writing centers, writing program administration, and multidisciplinary communication. Her book, Disrupt This! MOOCs and the Promises of Technology was published by University Press of New England in 2017.
In 2012-13, she was awarded a Georgia Tech Fund for Innovation in Research and Education Grant. Head's classes center on analyzing, critiquing, evaluating, and creating a variety of texts that demonstrate an understanding of audience and adaptation of multimodal rhetorical strategies and tools. Students and colleagues consistently rank her teaching as excellent. In 2012-13, she won the CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Award. In 2019, she was honored with the Georgia Tech Outstanding Service Award.
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