DR. CRUZ MEDINA is an award-winning teacher-researcher and Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English department at Santa Clara University. Dr. Medina also serves as faculty with Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. Previously, Dr. Medina was an Inclusive Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow at Santa Clara University, and was also Pre-doctoral Fellow at Texas State University in San Marcos. Arizona.
DR. CRUZ MEDINA is a national leader in Latinx Rhetoric and Writing research, having served as co-chair of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) College Composition and Communication Conference (CCCC) from 2016-2020. Researching and speaking on issues of culturally relevant writing, racial discrimination in online spaces, and decolonial approaches to multilingual writing, Dr. Medina has been a featured speaker at national conferences and an invited speaker at many universities.
DR. CRUZ MEDINA’s new book Sanctuary: Exclusion, Violence, and Indigenous Migrants in the East Bay Medina demonstrates the ways in which immigration policy and educational barriers exclude Indigenous migrant populations. Dr. Medina follows the community at the “Sanctuary”—a Spanish-speaking church in the East Bay Area that serves as a place of worship, English language instruction, and refuge for migrants. Medina assembles participant observations, interviews, surveys, and other data to give points of entry into intersecting issues of immigration, violence, language, and property and to untangle aspects of citizenship, exclusion, and assumptions about literacy.
DR. CRUZ MEDINA’s writing was included in the Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2020. Dr. Medina was awarded the 2017 M. Ruth Marino Chair for Curriculum Innovation at the Bread Loaf School of English. Dr. Medina was a Bannan Institute Scholar for Racial and Ethnic Justice from 2016-2018. Dr. Medina has been awarded multiple grants for his research on prison transformation and the Shakespeare in San Quentin program.
Cruz Medina 