Dr. Matt Hollrah is an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of First-Year Composition at UCO. He is a native of Stillwater, Oklahoma, where he received his B.A. in English from Oklahoma State University. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (poetry) from Western Michigan University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kansas.

Dr. Hollrah has presented papers at various local and national conferences, including NCTE’s Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference, and the National Association for Humanities Education Conference. He has published work in the minnesota review and has work forthcoming in READER. He was a finalist in 2005 for the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry from Nimrod International Journal. He is also an external reviewer for InSight, a journal of faculty scholarship on teaching and learning at Park University.

In Fall 2007, Dr. Hollrah received a grant from UCO’s Innovative Technology for Transformational Learning Incentive Program to conduct a pilot research project using Morae usability software to make digital recordings of student writing processes. The study, entitled Recording Writers in Action: Transforming Student Writing Processes by Transforming Teacher Response, will not only record student writing processes but his own grading and response processes as well with the overall aim of improving student response to instructor feedback. He will begin this project in Fall 2008.

Dr. Hollrah’s academic interests include rhetoric, composition theory and pedagogy, modernist poetry and poetics, and the intersection of epistemology and literary interpretation. He lives with his wife, Julie, and their two children, Sadie and Simon, in Edmond.