Tim Becker (he, they) is a musician, writer, visual artist, scholar, and award-winning Instructor of First-Year Writing in the University Writing Program at Virginia Tech. His skills include curriculum design and teaching, communication design and outreach, project planning and management, and video and music production. Since joining Virginia Tech in 2019, he received a Favorite Faculty Award nomination (2021) from the Division of Student Affairs, the Joyce Gentry Smoot Teaching Award (2023) from the Department of English, and Certificate of Teaching Excellence (2024) from the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.
He is a 2019 graduate of the M.A. English program in Rhetoric & Composition at NCSU and winner of the Department of English 2018–2019 Distinguished Capstone Award and the 2018–2019 Graduate Student Association Award for Excellence in Classroom Teaching. He holds a B.A. from UNC Chapel Hill, where he double majored in Philosophy and English, minored in History, and graduated with Highest Honors in English and with Highest Distinction.
His scholarly work centers on writing theory and pedagogy, epistemology, and digital rhetorics, appearing in Composition Forum (2023), Composition Studies (2024), and Textshop Experiments (forthcoming). He has presented at Corridors: The Blue Ridge Rhetoric and Writing Conference and the Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy. His educational materials and visual art have been used in outreach materials for the North Carolina Language and Life Project and in teaching resources for Pathways: General Education at Virginia Tech. He served as project manager and curriculum designer for the university grant-funded educational site, Learning Sessions: Writing, Research, & Digital Literacy.
In his artistic endeavors, he has written and produced five music albums: The Plaid Album (2017), Galapagos (2018), Treeshadows (2019, Jan.), Moss (2019, Jul.), and Tectonics (2023). He has published several collections of poetry, including New York City Bones (2011), Sorrow Birds (2012), and The Planetarium (2013). His poetry and fiction appear in And/Both Magazine (2017; 2018; 2019) and Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature (2024), while his interviews and essays have been featured in And/Both Magazine (2018), Stories from the Field (2018), Entropy (2019), Hokies Write (2019), and Academic Packways (2020).
