About Emily
M.A. in Composition · Twelve Years Teaching Writing and Composition in Higher Education · Grant development strategist with more than $20 million in federal, state, local, and foundation funding secured and developed.
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EXPERIENCE AT A GLANCE
12 Years Teaching writing and composition in higher education
$20M+ in Funding developed and secured across federal, state, county, local, and foundation funding programs
Federal Grant Experience - Major federal agencies, including the Departments of Education, Labor, Energy, Health and Human Services, and the National Science Foundation
Community & Technical College Specialist - Expertise in workforce development, institutional capacity building, and grant strategy for two-year colleges
Grant Systems & Institutional Strategy
Designed and implemented institution-wide grant development systems, processes, documentation, and cross-functional workflows at multiple colleges
Institutional Leadership - Current accreditation and Institutional Effectiveness committee member supporting continuous improvement and organizational effectiveness
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Emily English came to grant development by way of the classroom, which is probably why she has never quite thought of it as fundraising.
For twelve years, she taught writing, English, and composition in post-secondary education. Most of her students were doing some version of the same hard thing: trying to turn a half-formed thought into something someone else could actually follow. Emily built her teaching around that — writing as a way of thinking, not just a way of presenting thoughts you'd already had. Students often showed up unsure of their own ideas and left able to say what they meant, clearly enough that other people took it seriously.
The writing itself was rarely the hard part. The hard part was translation — taking something that mattered enormously to the person who dreamed it up, and making a stranger understand why it should matter to them too.
That's the real throughline of her career, even if it doesn't show up cleanly on a résumé — teaching people to think and write more clearly, then helping the strongest of those ideas find the resources to become real. Ideas rarely make it on their own. Most of them need someone who's willing to sit with them long enough to help them grow into something real.
The Writing House is what happens when that throughline gets named on purpose. It's built around the same things Emily has always done — writing, fundraising, consulting, teaching — but now there's a name for why. Underneath it are six things she's decided work actually needs, to be worth doing: contribution, learning, teaching, creativity, community, beauty.
There is also a longer arc to this story, one that runs toward Spain.
Emily calls it a more deliberate version of the life she's already building. It combines the work — writing, fundraising, consulting, teaching — with culture, conversation, beauty, and community, in a place that already knows how to hold all of that together. She's said it plainly: she wants to keep doing the work she cares about for as long as she's able.
The Writing House is the name she's given to that intention — one document, one project, one good idea at a time, for a life she's building on purpose.
Want to work together?