Alumna Erin Berry-McCrea is the recipient of the 2018 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award.

McCrea will be recognized during the 2019 annual conference in Baltimore. She is a doctoral candidate in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is also a lecturer for the department of Communication Studies at Towson University.

She is a 2017 recipient of the Dresher Center for the Humanities Graduate Residential Fellowship at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the 2015 Jodi Crandall Fellowship for pre-dissertation research.  

A Durham native, she holds a Bachelor of Science in Mass Communication from UNC Pembroke and a master’s degree in Organizational Communication from Bowie State University.