About

Jennifer Burkett Pittman has been the coordinator of the Speer Writing Center since 2012, and as coordinator Jennifer has seen the writing center move from the basement of Lile Hall to its current prominent location across from Chick-Fil-A in Evans Student Center. She has also been instrumental in implementing the Writing Center Practicum course sequence. Although this Practicum is required for English Education majors, many students choose to take it as an elective.

Having transitioned to the university's Writing Program Administrator in 2017 and engaged in multiple facets of composition, Pittman has twice submitted panel proposals and has twice been selected to present at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (4Cs). The first presentation was titled “Navigating Sacred Spaces in the Ivory Tower” which was part of the panel Come to Jesus: The Heuristics of Science and Faith in the Southern Composition Classroom.

The second presentation, “Where Do you Think You’re Going? Brain Drain in a Small Southern Community,” was part of the panel titled (Re)-branding Town & Gown: Bridging the Gap between the Local Community and the Ivory Tower. In September 2016 and September 2017, and on a more local level, Pittman spoke at Ouachita Baptist University's Faculty Colloquium about the Speer Writing Center.

Recently she has become attracted to literary tourism, a subject that co-mingles her love of literature with her love for travel. She enjoys visiting the birthplaces, gravesites, and homes and homestead remnants of her favorite authors. Literary tourism jaunts have taken her to the birthplaces, homes, and graves of the Brontë sisters, Truman Capote, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, Willie Morris, Beatrix Potter, John Ruskin, William Shakespeare, Eudora Welty, William Wordsworth, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, and W. B. Yeats. She turned this love of literature and travel into the topic of the Senior Literature Seminar, the captstone experience for English majors, in the spring of 2021.