Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness, Blue Crow Books, 2020, Final Girl Books, 2023. From the award-winning author of Sexism Ed and Grace Period comes a “haunting, mesmerizing” memoir-in-essays about survival, hope, and the strength we find within ourselves to survive a world that tries to break us. When Kelly J. Baker was two […]
Published at Women in Higher Education on February 1, 2019: By the end of the month, I would self‐assess and usually decide that I wasn’t living up to my true potential. I pushed myself harder. My worth was being determined by word counts and bylines. Being productive became what mattered most, even as I knew […]
Published at Women in Higher Education on January 4, 2019: The AAR is my guild, my learned society, still, and their annual conference was supposed to be a space to discuss my research and have job interviews. But the conference was never really safe.
Published at Women in Higher Education on Jan. 4, 2019: Each month, not only are there stories about the trauma and violence women endure, but also new studies that document gender gaps in pay, promotion and leadership, as well as the reports about how women shoulder the bulk of student loan debt. Newswatch makes me want […]
Published at Women in Higher Education on Dec. 3, 2018: I somehow learned that imperfection was failure. Things would be perfect or things would be ruined. There was no gray area in which to live.
Published at Women in Higher Education on Nov. 1, 2018. Lately, I have returned to Lorde’s essay. I find that I need to remind myself that adopting silence won’t protect me from all the people, mostly men, who have hurt me, nor will silence erase the trauma I’ve endured at their hands. Silence, she reminds me, doesn’t […]