I am currently the Associate Director of Composition, at both the George Mason University home campus and at the branch campus in Songdo, South Korea & coordinator and instructor in the Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines courses for INTO Mason, Mason’s pathway program for graduate and undergraduate international students.

I was born in Beirut, Lebanon, during the civil war to a Lebanese father and American mother. When I was four years old, my family fled to the neighboring island of Cyprus where I grew up in a community of refugees from surrounding countries. As a bi-cultural, bi-national child from a post-colonial context, I grew up with English, Arabic, and French as native languages and Greek as a second language. These intercultural, translingual experiences inspired me to pursue a BA in English with a concentration in Cultural Studies, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at George Mason University. I graduated from the MFA program in 2006. My thesis, which I hope to continue working on someday, is titled “A Block from Bliss Street: Growing up as a child of the Lebanese civil war.” I am currently pursuing a PhD in Writing and Rhetoric also at Mason, where I served as the Associate Director of the Writing Center for five years until I transitioned to my current position as Associate Director of Composition for Multilingual Writers.

My research and publications have focused on the experiences of multilingual writers adapting to the expectations of the U.S. academy, faculty perceptions of writing by multilingual students, and designing writing courses that are attuned to the diverse needs of this population. I am currently working on an autoethnography that aims to explore and theorize individual experiences of trauma and displacement.

By the time I graduated from the University of Virginia with a Masters in Linguistics, I had been tutoring writing for 10 years. I am interested in the role writing centers play to support multilingual and international writers who speak English as a Second language while recognizing and honoring their linguistic and cultural identities.

Currently, I teach Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines with INTO Mason where I get to work with writers from different cultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds. Being a Ugandan multilingual who learned English in a polylingual post-colonial culture, I am grateful to continue collaborating with other multilingual writers.

I am also pursuing a PhD in Writing and Rhetoric at George Mason University. My research focuses on the writing center and its potential role in literacy and language policies in non-Western contexts.

Born and raised in southern China, I came to the U.S. in 2012 for advancing my education. After completing a Master of Education in Teaching English as a Second Language in 2014, I began teaching academic writing to domestic and international multilingual writers in both community college and university settings. As a writer who uses English as an additional language, over the years, I have seen how my own writing experiences have played a part in my work as a writing tutor and writing instructor to graduate student writers.

I am one of the co-authors of An A-W of Academic Literacy: A Reference Guide for Graduate Students, to be published in 2021 by the University of Michigan Press.

Currently I am pursuing a doctoral degree in Teaching and Curriculum at the Warner School of Education, University of Rochester. My dissertation research will focus on the experiences of writing tutors who are graduate students themselves and work with graduate students.