Like many universities, Xavier has relied more and more on the skills and services of part-time instructors to fulfil its special mission. During my time as Director of First-year Composition, I've had the pleasure of working with many incredible writing teachers who only worked with us for a brief time and in limited capacity. These teachers are skilled and resourceful. They bring working knowledge of the discipline, its trends and directions, and a honed instinct to adapt to the norms of different institutions. They learn quickly, fit in well, and are absolutely crucial to our ability to deliver our course and program outcomes to students.
Too often, though, they are left out of many aspects of faculty communities, from the official and decision-making ones, to the informal and collegial pieces as well. We need them and value them, but too often we come up short in supporting them in their work, and including them in ours.
In an effort to address this gap, during the fall semester of 2023, CAT+FD piloted a program of support for part-time faculty that included a dedicated orientation and a series of monthly open sessions targeting their needs. It has been my pleasure to extend my work in composition to a newly created position supporting part-time faculty across the university.
Our first semester of work had its ups and downs, to be expected in a pilot program. Without doubt, incoming part-time instructors were brought up to speed more quickly and efficiently this term. Having a point person with a broad base of institutional knowledge proved beneficial, someone to address the myriad "little things" that pop up day to day in a classroom. Beyond the day-to-day, there's also the special, mission-driven knowledge, the culture we are all steeped in, which often goes uncommunicated to part-time instructors. This cohort got access to much more of both kinds of knowledge, and we learned along the way how to better deliver even more of it in future semesters. I'm proud of the work we did and look forward to supporting an even stronger part-time cohort in the future.
In the meantime, I'm thrilled to present snapshots of the amazing accomplishments of two of our outstanding part-time instructors, who completed the pilot program and became CAT+FD Certified Xavier Part-time Instructors.
Charles D. Brown is a writer, filmmaker, and educator from New Orleans, La. His books include Looking Back On Sodom and the collection The Weird Ones, and two fantasy novels as C.D. Brown, Vamp City and Fate’s Stiletto. He has written and directed two feature films, including Angels Die Slowly (a gothic neo-noir available on Tubi) and Never a Dull Moment: 20 Years of the Rebirth Brass Band (available on YouTube). He has taught composition, English, and screenwriting at most of the major New Orleans universities, including fall of 2023 at Xavier.
Skye Jackson was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Electric Literature, Green Mountains Review, RATTLE and elsewhere. Her chapbook A Faster Grave won the 2019 Antenna Prize. Her work has been a finalist for the 2023 Iowa Review Poetry Award, the RATTLE Poetry Prize, the RHINO Founders' Prize, and in 2021 she received the AWP Intro Journals Award. Skye's work was also selected by Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project. In 2022, she won the KGB Open Mic Contest in New York City and served as the Writer-In-Residence at the Key West Literary Seminar in Florida. In 2023, she was a finalist for the Brooklyn Poets "Poem of the Year" award. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Libre, is forthcoming from Regalo Press and will be distributed by Simon & Schuster in summer 2024.
Skye will be returning to teach at Xavier in the spring. We are so glad to have her back. Charles has accepted a full-time teaching position at Loyola, and we wish him the absolute best for the future.
-Jeremy Tuman