Trom, Kelsey

Kelsey Trom is an Associate Professor of English at Tusculum University, where she is the Writing Program Coordinator; the editor of The Tusculum Review, our in-house international literary journal; faculty advisor to Sit Lux, Tusculum’s student-led undergraduate literary journal; and the Harriet Reeves Neff Chair of Fine Arts. Her fiction and essays have been published in Makeout Creek and other venues. She swims with the Kingsport Viperfish.

She teaches composition, creative writing, journal production, Theatre of the World, Literature of Sexuality, Nature Writing and Environmental Literature, Editing for Publication, senior seminar, and special topics like Afrofuturism: Black to the Future; Man v. Nature: Literature of the Wilderness, the Frontier, and Agrarian Life; Beach Reads: Escapist Fiction Then and Now; Tales of Physical Endurance and Survival; and Journalism from Outside the Establishment. Her pedagogical interests lie in educational access and she has presented at teaching conferences on the dynamics of classroom gatherings and implicit bias, novels for non-English majors, strategies for teaching developmental students, written portraits of addiction and recovery, and the inclusion of LGBTQ+ narratives in class and on campus.

She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Bachelor’s in English from the University of Virginia. Between these degrees, she spent two years studying in VCU’s immersive studio art programs—Art Foundations and Illustration. Before coming to Tennessee in 2014, she mowed lawns, worked retail, provided childcare, and taught as a teaching assistant and adjunct at several universities, community colleges, and military bases in the Richmond area.