About

​Accomplishments 

Hi! I am Crystal J. Zanders. In the summer of 2025, with the support of an American Association of University Women (AAUW) Dissertation Fellowship, I defended my dissertation, Unseen: Black Autistic Women's Masking Practices, Pressures, and Possibilities which examines how Black autistic women hide their autism. In this project, I hope to work towards building a more accepting world where Black autistic women don't have to hide. This completed my PhD in English and Education from the University of Michigan.

​

While I was a student, I was a Rackham Merit Fellow, a 2022-2023 Oklahoma Center for the Humanities Fellow, a communications fellow at the Ecology Center (sponsored by the  Rackham Doctoral Internship Program), and a member of Tulsa Remote . My scholarly work has been published in College Composition and Communication, Pedagogy, and Assessing Writing. My creative work has been featured in Mud Season Review, Rigorous, WusGood? and elsewhere.

 

I began my teaching career in rural Mississippi in 2007 after earning my BA in Spanish at the University of Tennessee at Martin. Since then, I have taught English to every grade from 7-12 in traditional and alternative settings as well as GED classes, community college courses, and university English and/or education classes. I have designed both online and in person classes, some of which I created myself. Along the way, I received my Master of Teaching-Secondary from Mississippi State University and my Master of Fine Arts-Poetry from the University of New Mexico.

 

Values

I love education. Ultimately, I am someone who seeks and shares knowledge, working to answers the questions that drive our world. I seek knowledge through taking classes, attending conferences, reading, and conducting research. I share knowledge as an educator and as a writer.

 

As an educator, I work to give students access to the skills needed to seek knowledge on their own with the goals of facilitating collective growth and increasing educational access. Increasing educational access involves creating spaces where intersectional identities aren’t just tolerated but welcomed and embraced. Those identities include members of different racial, linguistic, and cultural groups; members of the LGBTQIA+ communities; members of various faith communities; folks with physical, mental, behavioral, social, learning, communication, intellectual disabilities as well as sensory minorities.

 

In my teaching I have adopted radical accessibility as a foundational principle. For many of the classes that I teach (in person and online), I select the course content. I write the syllabi, calendars, assignments, and assessments (most of which are project-based). I record or source the videos myself. With that freedom comes the responsibility to design a student experience that takes the diverse student and instructor needs into account. Radical accessibility means that the needs of my students with disabilities and my needs as an instructor are built into the course design and the curriculum rather than accommodated on the back end. 

 

Writing allows me to reach through time and space and connect with others seeking and sharing knowledge. It gives me a space where I can be myself, to unmask in ways that are impractical in our world. It challenges me to explore and interrogate my inner world while challenging popular misconceptions for others of about autism and life as a Black woman. (I wrote about this in detail in my dissertation.)

 

So, what’s next?

I plan to continue doing work that allows me to seek and share knowledge and to be a force for good in this world. I will also encourage, support and (hopefully) inspire others who are doing the same.