She grew up in New Jersey and went to college and graduate school in Pennsylvania, earning her BA from Lafayette College and her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. She teaches courses in composition, rhetoric, pedagogy, and professional and technical writing. Her research interests include composition history, theory, and pedagogy, invention, authorship, and textual reuse. She investigates the many inventive and surprising ways in which writers reuse old texts in new writing. Her current project theorizes and historicizes a pedagogy of rewriting she calls “critical-creative tinkering,” in which readers gain critical insight through creatively manipulating preexisting texts.