Denise Chapman

Dr Denise Chapman is a counternarrative storyteller, spoken word poet, and critical autoethnographer who lectures in children’s literature, early literacy, and inclusive children’s media at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Dr Chapman has served as a literacy specialist focused on critical media literacy in Australia, Fiji, and the United States. Denise uses oral stories, children’s literature, poetry, and digital images as counternarrative windows for social disruption and liberation. She is currently exploring preservice teachers experiences with diverse transmedia stories for children, and how teachers consider the impacts of diverse stories on children’s imagined possibilities. Collecting and analysing children’s literature, poetry, and short films centring the Global African experience serve as a favourite pastime for Denise.

Her most recent publication entitled ‘The Crooked Room: Intersectional tap dancing, Academic Performing, and Negotiating Black, woman, Immigrant’ is a critical poetic autoethnography that shares her wayfinding experience as an African American woman academic working in a White-privileged Australian university, trying to survive systems of oppression unacknowledged by those within the university space.

In an upcoming edited book by Dr Jeff Share entitled Ecowriting in Every Classroom, Denise discusses the freedoms and conscious-raising connections that stories lend to those experiencing oppression, as stories can help us fly.