I work with folks on a sliding scale to complete manuscripts and explore publishing options. I love working with writers who are making academic projects, works of poetry, nonfiction, hybrids, and autobiographical fiction. My specialties are supporting disabled and neurodivergent people and those with educational trauma (mostly multiply marginalized people) complete work, strategize sustainable relationships to the art of writing, and publish! Feel free to email for more info: Emerson dot whitney at goddard dot edu
Mini Manifesto
In the spring of 2024, Goddard College, where I taught and received my undergraduate degree announced its closure. This institute has been part of my life since 2008, when my boss Peter Kaplan at the New York Observer paid me under the table to go to school because he figured Observer would lay us all off, which it did, and in his mind, I was particularly vulnerable without a degree. I’d been to 6 other colleges and couldn’t graduate for the life of me. The undergraduate program at Goddard was finally it. The program was one-on-one focused and centered around my own invented curriculum and process. I was also able to fully focus on my special interest (writing) and not have to deviate to meet random requirements. After growing up in special ed and receiving very little guidance after that, I finally graduated with a college degree from Goddard in 2011 and went on to get an MFA and then a PhD. I came back to Goddard gratefully in 2017 to teach undergraduate creative writing mostly, but also all the things. My brilliant colleagues, Muriel Shockley, Herukhuti Williams, Zelaika Hepworth Clarke, Otto Muller, Leora Gansworth, Sarah Gotowka, and others over the years have shaped all my thoughts about the possibilities of decolonial, re-Indigenizing, pro-Black pedagogy. With this foundation of decolonality, access needs are prioritized for disabled people without diagnosis as a ticket to accommodations, experimental forms and methods of learning are celebrated, learning becomes emotional and circular and new and old. It is a mess and it’s generative and transformational, it’s also queer and trans and disabled and autistic and vibrant as hell. We have spent a lot of time asking if it’s possible to actually decolonize the institute, one that was founded on the basis of upholding a third pillar of white supremacy. John Frederick Bell in “Race, Power, and Education in Early America,” (quoting Wilder) writes about the academy’s role to provide ‘intellectual cover for the social and political subjugation of non-white peoples,’ “Were universities the sine qua non of white supremacy? No, but Wilder ranks them as “the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage” along with the church and the state.” The truth of this resounds and I, of course, find myself looking to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s work for answers with hope for an undercommons of thinking and makership that could hold the incredible pedagogy that my colleagues have honed for decades, of which I am a lifelong student.