Kimberly Jean Smith has joyfully taught Creative Writing, Literature, Critical Thinking, Journalism, and Composition courses at Gavilan College in Gilroy, California, since 1999.

Currently she co-coordinates her campus’ Puente program, which supports academic success for historically underrepresented college students by focussing on Mexican-American and Latino culture, issues, and literature. From 2004-2012 she coordinated Gavilan’s Writing Center, developing peer-based services for campus writers as well as a community-based family literacy program.

In Spring 2014 she co-presented Beg, Borrow, and Steal: Twenty-five Best Teaching Practices from Teachers who Write for Writers who Teach at the annual Association for Writing Programs conference in Seattle.

In 2009, she received Gavilan’s faculty of the year award.

Her classrooms reflect her belief that writing is a physical experience as much as a mental one. She designs activities for maximum engagement of mind and body, utilizing peer-based interaction, experimentation, and play, in order for students to learn deeply, gain fluency as readers and writers, and achieve meta-cognitive awareness they can apply in multiple arenas of their lives.

She received a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2012, and a Masters of Science degree from Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism, in 1993. Her bachelor’s degree is in Fine Arts and was earned at California Institute of the Arts. She also attended Hartnell College, in Salinas, her hometown.

In addition to her work as a college instructor, she has been a journalist at daily newspapers and alternative weeklies in New York City, Southern Maine, and California and offered home-based community writing classes in Santa Cruz where she currently lives.

For more information please contact her at ksmith@gavilan.edu and/or during the academic year at (408) 848-4889.