Alena A. Hairston, PhD, MFA

Alena A. Hairston is an award-winning author and college/university professor, specializing in English literature and composition, creative writing, African American Literature, social justice literature, humanities, and the social sciences. She earned her Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English and Integrative Studies from Guilford College, her Master of Arts in Humanistic Psychology from Saybrook University, her Master of Fine Arts in English and Creative Writing from Brown University, and her PhD in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law from Alliant International University. At Guilford College she helped to establish the major in African American Studies. At Alliant, she won the Dean's Award for Excellence from the California School of Forensic Studies. She has published award-winning works, most notably the poetry collection The Logan Topographies and selections in the groundbreaking anthology Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Her works have been published in various literary journals and magazines. Her writing and scholarship encompass wide-ranging areas such as poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary analysis and criticism, grant-writing, and technological documentation. She has worked for public and private educational institutions as a tenured professor, guest lecturer, and adjunct instructor in English, Creative Writing, and Humanities. She is an advisory board member and reviewer for the University of Kentucky Press.

Alena has held several tenured and adjunct college and university teaching positions for over 20 years, including positions at Brown University, Rhode Island College, Bryant University, Santa Clara University, Merritt College, Berkeley City College, and more. She has served as instructor and program coordinator for Umoja and Puente, and she has served on various institutional committees such as the Basic Skills Initiative, the Learning Communities Program, and the Ethnic Studies Program. She has served as the Humanities Academic Senator and as a Master Panelist Reviewer for the Federal Department of Labor's Trade Adjustment Assistance and College Training Programs Grant Competition for national community colleges. Alena's experience also includes technical project management, technical writing, web content development, and grant-writing for various companies such as Pearson Publishing, Thomson Publishing, and Pacific Gas and Electric. Alena's current research focuses on higher education policy related to community college students, as well as the plights of workers in rural regions of the United States.