Mary Ann Zehr has been teaching writing at EMU since the 2019-2020 academic year. She teaches first-year writing and news & feature writing. She also directs EMU's writing and communication program. Her research has focused on how students engage with sources in first-year composition. For her dissertation, Mary Ann investigated the research and writing processes of multilingual writers. Mary Ann was a journalist for 14 years for Education Week and then an English, history, and ESL teacher in public high schools for eight years. She and a friend taught English at a medical college in Sichuan, China, in the mid-1980s, and in 2024 they published a memoir, Doors Cracked Open: Teaching in a Chinese Closed City, with Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock. Mary Ann has written essays and feature articles for the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, Anabaptist World, and The Harrisonburg Citizen.
Mary Ann is passionate about supporting students to use their voices in speech or writing to advocate for themselves and their communities. She believes everyone has a story to tell and something to say that will benefit the people around them.
