Plemons named WSU’s 2019 Woman of the Year

Anna Plemons, a clinical assistant professor of English, has been selected as the 2019 WSU Woman of the Year.

Plemons teaches classes on the WSU Pullman campus in composition, rhetoric, and digital technology and culture. Additionally, she is the director of the Critical Literacies and Achievement and Success Program (CLASP) for the College of Arts and Sciences.

She works with WSU faculty, staff and and students on issues of retention and persistence, paying particular attention to the relationship between pedagogy and retention for underrepresented students. Since 2009, she has also held a grant‑funded teaching position with the California Arts in Corrections Program. This allows here to teach creative nonfiction classes at multiple prisons in northern California and oversee a research‑based literacy project aimed at empowering incarcerated students to be literacy mentors in their respective families.

CLASP partners with existing student services to support retention and degree completion goals. CLASP is designed to address the retention and degree completion rates of first‑generation, multicultural, low‑income, or otherwise underrepresented students. The program began in Pullman and expanded to WSU Vancouver in 2016.

Plemons and five other 2019 WSU Women of Distinction will be honored at the 2019 WSU Women of Distinction Celebration, on  March 4, in the M.G. Carey Senior Ballroom of the Compton Union Building on the WSU Pullman campus. The theme for the celebration, “Let Equality Bloom,” will be reflected in the event’s artwork by California botanical artist and women’s rights activist, Brooke Fisher, as part of the Amplifier Foundation’s traveling exhibition, “Hear Our Voice.”

Originally posted at WSU News