Recent Personal Favorites

Desiree Hellegers is a university professor, oral historian, poet, playwright, member/producer with the Old Mole Variety Hour Collective on KBOO Radio in Portland, Oregon, and contributor to Counterpunch.org

​

A brief and privileged experience of houselessness as an undergrad and working outside academia–as a bartender, taxi driver, janitor, cook, office temp, caregiver, motel maid, detox driver and live-in shelter worker–shapes their work as a teacher and scholar/writer.  Their first job out of university was as a Jesuit Volunteer on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. They were fired.

​

Hellegers has taught for nearly thirty years in the English Department at Washington State University Vancouver classes ranging from Shakespeare through a postcolonial/ecofeminist/climate justice lens, to Creative Writing (poetry, creative nonfiction), to Native Literature co-taught with Chinook Tribal Chair Tony Johnson–in a fifteen foot tribal canoe on the Columbia River. They designed the course in consultation with their frequent collaborator Lakota-Cheyenne activist/organizer/researcher Roben White.

​

They are a founding co-director–with Noel Sturgeon–of WSU's Collective for Social and Environmental Justice (CSEJ), which is celebrating its 20th year in 2022. CSEJ coordinates/d public events, talks and conferences, and for years offered a certificate in Social and Environmental Etudies and will again soon. 

​

Hellegers and White co-conceived The Thin Green Line is People History Project, and collaborate on the archive with WSU alum Derya Ruggles, actor, and playwright.

​

More information on Hellegers' work can be found here.

for

​

Degrees: B.A., Georgetown University

M.A./Ph.D., University of Washington

Visiting Fellow, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University ('91-2)

Books: No Room of Her Own: Women's Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death, and Resistance (Palgrave 2011)

Handmaid to Divinity: Natural Philosophy, Poetry and Gender in Seventeenth England (2000)

Dumbo Elegies (draft chapbook)