Biographical Statement

JCM Eldred is Full Professor of English at the University of Kentucky.  She is a narrative and rhetorical theorist, as well as a writer of creative nonfiction and poetry. Her work ranges over three broad areas in English: rhetoric and writing studies, literary analysis, and creative writing. Over the course of her career, she has published short-form work as varied as “Faulkner’s Still Life: Art and Abortion in The Wild Palms” (literary criticism), “Modern Fidelity” (literary essay, creative nonfiction), “Children at All Costs” (personal essay), and “Researching Electronic Networks” (with Gail Hawisher, social science scholarship).

She is the author of four books: More Sonnets from the Portuguese (poetry, 2016); Literate Zeal (scholarship, U of Pittsburgh Press, 2012; Sentimental Attachments (cnf/essays, 2005); and Imagining Rhetoric (co-authored with Peter Mortensen, scholarship, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). She is currently working on another volume of poetry and a scholarly book, co-authored with Peter Mortensen.

Eldred is best known for her work with Peter Mortensen that brings together the two theoretical worlds of writing studies and literary criticism.  Their 1992 College English article named and defined the genre, “literacy narratives.”  Following publication of “Reading Literacy Narratives,” the genre has been identified and studied not only in fiction, but also in a wide array of nonfiction. Indeed, the study of literacy narratives remains robust in humanistic scholarship, and this foundational work has informed academic research across a range of disciplines. Eldred & Mortenson’s work on literacy narratives figures consequentially in highly-cited books in literary studies, rhetorical studies, translation studies, and gender studies. It continues to be cited favorably in new books and articles, and in approximately 70 doctoral dissertations, stretching from the late 1990s through 2024. Routledge UK in June 2024 released Elena West’s Representations of Language Learning and Literacy: How to Read Literacy Narratives. There has also been a concerted effort to create repositories to preserve literacy narratives composed by community members as well as academics, both in the U.S. and abroad.  

Eldred and Mortensen have recently published “Returning to Literacy Narratives,” which aims to account for transnational narratives. Their new book in progress, From Longing to Belonging: Literacy Narratives in Domicana Fiction, continues this work and begins with this premise: While a late 20^th-century multicultural framework for literacy narratives frequently positions immigrant characters in a liminal space of “neither here nor there,” a transnational, bidirectional framework imagines the alternative of “both here and there.” At stake is belonging. Within transnational communities, people continue through their lives to move—physically, virtually, and imaginatively—between or among nations and national allegiances. As they do, literacies that have taken root in particular places blend and move with them.  The book in progress looks to Dominicana literature to help us imagine possibilities for dwelling in two locations culturally, and even to some extent physically. Such literature activates a rhetoric of belonging, of being present “both here and there.” 

Depending on departmental needs and student interest, she has taught courses at the graduate and undergraduate level in U.S. women’s literature, editing and publishing, creative writing, rhetorical and writing studies, and law and literature.