Dr. Rick Marlatt serves as Associate Dean of the Graduate School at New Mexico State University where he previously served as Director of the School of Teacher Preparation, Administration, and Leadership and received NMSU’s 2020 Leading the Way Award and the 2018 College of Education Emerging Scholars Award. As Professor of English Language Arts and Literacy Education, his work bridges the fields of teacher education, creative writing, digital literacies, literature study, and sociocultural theory. His most recent work appears in English Education, Research in the Teaching of English, English Journal, English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Journal of Education, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, and Action in Teacher Education. His latest co-edited book, Teaching for Equity, Justice, and Antiracism with Digital Literacy Practices, was published in 2024, and his previous co-edited book, Esports Research and its Integration in Education, was published in 2021. He is also the author of three poetry collections: November Father, from Finishing Line Press; Desired Altitude, winner of the Standing Rock Cultural Arts Poetry Award, and How We Fall Apart, winner of the Seven Circle Press Poetry Award. His leadership at NMSU has prioritized generating equity, access, and diversity within New Mexico’s educator pipeline, and he has been funded for and contributed to over $19 million in sponsored projects such as paid teacher residencies, recruitment and retention of Native American educators, development of culturally and linguistically responsive curricula, and more. He received his MFA from the University of California, Riverside and his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has been a faculty member at NMSU since 2017.
Education
Ph.D. University of Nebraska-Lincoln
M.F.A. University of California, Riverside
M.A. University of Nebraska at Kearney
B.A. University of Nebraska at Kearney
Scholarly Areas of Interest
As a literacy researcher and educator, I pursue an interdisciplinary program of research through critical, sociocultural perspectives of the intersections of education, literacy, and culture, organized within the following five strands of scholarship: 1) Enhancing and diversifying New Mexico's teacher education pipeline through inclusivity and access; 1) Positioning digital literacies to promote justice-driven opportunities inclusive of sociocultural contexts in preservice and secondary English language arts education; 3) Investigating the implementation of multicultural, multi-genre literature study to develop critical literacies and cultural competency among secondary learners; 4) Reimagining K-20 educative spaces through humanities-based approaches that account for participants’ individualities and personalized experiences; and 5) Integrating creative writing practices into teacher education settings to empower preservice teachers toward identity exploration and the cultivation of critical pedagogy.
