Teaching Portfolio — 2026
Writing as witness. Memory.
Community-based pedagogy centering anti-racist practice.
Cross-medium writing, POC & LGBTQ+ narratives,
and the landscapes where memory lives.
I believe that writing is not merely a technical skill to be acquired — it is a practice of witness, a form of presence, and a way of insisting that one's life, community, and story matter. My classrooms are built around this conviction.
My pedagogy is rooted in anti-racist praxis, centering the experiences and literary traditions of communities that have been historically excluded from the canon. I draw heavily from POC and LGBTQ+ writers — not as supplementary voices, but as the primary architects of the curriculum.
I teach through hybrid and cross-medium forms — letter-writing, nature journaling, documentary analysis, creative-critical hybrid essays — because I believe form is never neutral. The structure of an assignment is itself a pedagogical statement about whose knowledge counts and how.
Ultimately, I seek to build classrooms where students feel equipped to move through landscapes of memory — personal, historical, ecological — with curiosity, rigor, and care.
Courses designed
& taught
Course 01
Literature · OnlineThe Life of
Toni Morrison
Exploring what made Morrison the writer she was — and how her works illuminate the complexity of racism and the depth of Black inner life.
Course 02
Literature · Independent StudyToni Morrison:
Independent Study
A deeper one-on-one exploration of Morrison's full body of work — expanding beyond biography into her essays, criticism, and the long arc of her literary vision.
Course 03
Art History · LectureCaspar David
Friedrich
A survey of Friedrich's Romantic landscapes as philosophical objects — how his paintings think through solitude, the sublime, and the human figure dwarfed by nature.
Course 04
Nature Writing · LiteratureHenry David
Thoreau
Reading Walden as a practice — students develop a living relationship to nature through sustained observation, walking, and their own writing.
Course 05
Photography · Independent StudyLandscape Narrative
Photography
An independent study weaving photography, place, and narrative — how images carry memory, history, and the things that resist language.
Course 06
Werewolves & the
History of Art
Tracing the werewolf through centuries of visual culture — from medieval manuscript illumination to Romantic horror to contemporary painting. What does the monster reveal about the body, desire, and the boundary between human and animal?
Syllabus in development. Contact for more information.
Course 07
Introduction to
Gothic Literature
A survey of the Gothic tradition from Walpole and Radcliffe through Poe, Shelley, and into the contemporary — reading the genre as a literature of anxieties, inheritance, and what cannot be buried.
Syllabus in development. Contact for more information.
What students say
Andy Swinford
Former Student
"Will was brilliant at the writing studio. His energy, excitement and enthusiasm were infectious. I went from a lot of notes but zero narrative, to a page and a half of cohesive narrative in just two sessions."
Student
The Life of Toni Morrison
"Will's class changed how I think about writing — not as a product to submit, but as a way of paying attention to the world and to myself."
Student
Henry David Thoreau
"I've never had a teacher who made the outdoors feel like a classroom and the page feel like a walk in the woods. The Thoreau course was genuinely transformative."
CV & Teaching Materials
Everything a search committee needs — available for immediate download.