Professor | Executive Director | Poet | Editor | Executive Coach
About Karen
Dr. Karen Head (Ph.D. University of Nebraska, M.A. University of Tennessee, B.A. Oglethorpe University, A.A. DeKalb College) is the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs at Augusta University, where she is also a Professor (tenured) in the Department of English and World Languages. Dr. Head is a certified Executive Coach and received a certificate from the Harvard Institute for Management and Leadership in Education in 2025.
Previously, she has served as Professor (tenured) in the Department of English and Technical Communication and the Director for the Center for Innovation and the Arts at Missouri S&T. She joined Missouri S&T after 17 years at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she served as the Associate Chair and Professor (tenured) in Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication and Founding Executive Director of the Institute-wide Communication Center.
In 2020, she was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Fulton County, Georgia. She is also the editor emerita of Atlanta Review and past editor of Southern Discourse in the Center: A Journal of Multiliteracy and Innovation. On a more unusual note, she is the Poet Laureate of Waffle House—a title that reflects an outreach program to bring arts awareness to rural high schools in Georgia, which has been generously sponsored by the Waffle House Foundation.
She has published six books of poetry (What We Missed: New and Selected Poems in English, German, and French, Lost on Purpose, Sassing, My Paris Year, On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year, and Shadow Boxes) and exhibited acclaimed digital poetry projects. Since 2006, she has been a Visiting Scholar at Technische Universität-Dortmund, Germany–an association that resulted in a trilingual collection of her poetry. Her book, Lost on Purpose, was translated into Mandarin by the esteemed Taiwanese translator, Dr. Lee Kuei-shien.
Her research focuses on higher education rhetoric, sustainable and innovative pedagogy and space design, communication theory and pedagogical practice, especially the implementation and development of writing centers, writing program administration, and multidisciplinary communication. Her book, Disrupt This! MOOCs and the Promises of Technology was published by University Press of New England in Spring 2017.
In 2012-13, she was awarded a Georgia Tech Fund for Innovation in Research and Education Grant. Head’s classes center on analyzing, critiquing, evaluating, and creating a variety of texts that demonstrate an understanding of audience and adaptation of multimodal rhetorical strategies and tools. Students and colleagues consistently rank her teaching as excellent. In 2012-13, she won the CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Award. In 2019, she was honored with the Georgia Tech Outstanding Service Award.
Karen J. Head, Ph.D. 