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A short autobiography. |
July 27, 1993, I defended my dissertation, Sociocomposition: Academic Writing and the Culture of Exclusion, said a tearful goodbye to my friends in graduate school, twenty years of eating the world's best seafood, living near the world's best beaches, and listening to Jimmy Buffett. On August 14, 1993, I arrived at A&M University-Corpus Christi, where I taught and developed the minors in Technical Writing and Journalism. Within six weeks of arriving in Corpus Christi, I met my husband-to-be when he came to talk to one of my classes because he was the only practicing technical writer in town. A true Texan, he was raised on a ranch south of San Antonio, went to A&M-College Station on a football scholarship, and was a member of the Corps. In fall 1999, I came to Texas State to develop the graduate Technical Communication program. Joe and I now live with our cats, Puck and Little Black Kitty (LBK), and dogs George, Sammy, and Milo in Wimberley, TX, a lovely town in the hill country. We are 15 miles west of San Marcos, 60 miles north of San Antonio, and 30 miles south of Austin, where I also teach at the Round Rock Higher Education Center (RRHEC). [last updated June 12, 2006] |
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I was born the middle child of John and Anne Allison in Charlotte, N.C., and raised in the 1960s in Chapel Hill, N.C., a small college town in the South. My life there framed a great deal of my thinking and is perhaps the reason I have chosen an academic career.
In the spirit of needing a tropical lifestyle I left the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill after two years and moved to Florida, where I enrolled in the University of South Florida in Tampa. After graduating from USF with a B.A. in Mass Communications and Sociology, I worked as a Journalist, a career that took me through several newspapers and cities in Florida to an M.A. in Journalism at the University of Florida in Gainesville. I liked being a Journalist; however, I decided what I really wanted to do was study writing.So I stepped back into academia and enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at the University of South Florida. There I began studying in the Rhetoric and Composition program, a largely theory driven program, and found myself drawn to technical writing, a specialty within Rhetoric and Composition. |