Meet Michelle Bright, Our New GA for Communications

Michelle Bright will be serving as the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies’ Graduate Assistant for Communications for the 2021- 2022 academic year. 

She has been a part of the Lafayette-Oxford-University community for over seventeen years. During her time in Oxford, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and in journalism with an emphasis on magazine publishing and a Master of Arts in Southern Studies from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture (CSSC), all at the University of Mississippi (UM.) Her volunteer work includes the Oxford Film Festival, Theatre Oxford, Oxford Conference for the Book, the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference, and the Southern Writers, Southern Writing conference organized by the English department graduate students. She served as a theater liaison for the Oxford High School theater department, which included coaching and transporting competing OHS students to the Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi. 

After completing her M.A. in 2012, Bright worked as an adjunct professor for the English Department. She also served as an AmeriCorps VISTA as a teaching assistant and public relations specialist in 2013 before joining the Department of Writing and Rhetoric as a first-year writing instructor. After seven years with the DWR, she has returned to graduate school full-time to complete a Master’s of Fine Arts in Documentary Expressions program at the CSSC. While teaching writing, Bright also worked as research assistant for UM journalism professor Ellen Meacham’s book, Delta Ephiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi. 

2019 was a big year for Bright. In addition to her teaching duties, she earned her certificate in Gender Studies, after completing 12 hours of Graduate-level Gender Studies courses. She also served as an assistant editor for SPARK, an open-access, anonymously peer-reviewed, online annual journal for activist students, teachers, and researchers in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies, where her duties included: copyediting submissions, promoting the journal on various social media platforms, and researching grant opportunities. That year, Bright also became involved with the Black Families of Yalobusha project, which included collecting interviews from several Black Families and using embodied storytelling to share their stories and their place in history. The project has since evolved into the Mississippi Hill Country Collective (MHCC) which serves to collect and share the stories of marginalized people throughout the Mississippi Hill Country. More recently, she worked with Study and Struggle, a prison education program that also serves as a coalition building and activist training organization. 

Bright has also worked as a freelance writer for over fifteen years. Her most recent national publications include an article in Ms. Magazine https://msmagazine.com/2019/03/22/we-dont-need-more-cruel intentions/?fbclid=IwAR0UiauOk_GqAColPe8xIODoIUT4IBmuFJAglkKdVHe2HA1iFr U9alOF4-w and an article on hunting camps in The Mississippi Encyclopedia. 

Bright is from Corinth, Mississippi, where she developed her love of storytelling by first listening to the intersectional stories of her family and their connections to the history of the town, something she hopes to explore in her documentary thesis for her MFA degree. She is excited to also use her intersectional research experience writing articles for the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies website.