Todd A. Comer
Writer · Scholar · Teacher
Todd is a writer, at home and at work. He holds a Ph.D. in American literature and film and is best understood as a teacher and interdisciplinary scholar of cultural studies with a particular focus on Appalachia, disability, and the environment.
In the recent past, Todd served as Director of Digital Humanities at Wilberforce University. Much of his early career was spent at Defiance College where he was Director of Composition. He has taught, presented, and published in the following areas: the digital humanities, composition, music, television, film, experimental fiction, and comics.
Lately, the best place to find him is at FOJO Beans or at an open mic night at The Green Room.
Current Work
Todd is currently working on a book of poems titled Haintology: Poems and Visitations. The manuscript draws from Jacques Derrida, Appalachian folklore, and the older, stranger language of haunting. It is also, more simply, a book about loss: the dead who remain, the places that will not leave us, and the voices that return whether called or not.
He is also at work on a memoir, Tied-Down: Lifted-Up, describing his life in West Virginia, his love of mid-century glass (Fenton, Blenko, Corning), and his family’s move from poverty into something resembling the middle class. It is ultimately a meditation on the things and people that hold you down and how sometimes the things that hold you down also lift you up.
His other project is Appalachian Glass: Furnace of Meaning and Memory, a proposed edited collection about Appalachian glass and the cultures that have gathered around it. The project begins with a simple premise: glass is never only glass. It is labor, inheritance, display, class aspiration, family ritual, loss, beauty, regional memory, and sometimes obsession.
The collection seeks creative nonfiction, memoir, personal essays, hybrid scholarship, oral history, literary journalism, reflective criticism, interviews, and poetry. It is especially interested in the people who have lived with glass in intimate and complicated ways: collectors, factory workers, decorators, dealers, thrifters, museum workers, descendants of glassworkers, artists, archivists, and families who have kept glass objects long after the factories changed, closed, or disappeared.
The book will look beyond catalogs, price guides, and factory histories. Those books matter. But this project asks a different set of questions. What does Appalachian glass hold for the people who make it, collect it, sell it, inherit it, remember through it, and place it in cabinets, windows, shelves, kitchens, churches, shops, museums, and family stories?
Todd was recently named a finalist in the Little Kanawha Reading Series Chapbook Contest, based on his book of poems, Mary and Etta: Appalachian Poems.
Image Note
Art by Aaron Kramer. Photo by TC.
Recent Publications
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2026
“The Hardest Thing About AI: Knowing When Not to Use It”
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2025-26
“The Silence of Rockford Chapel”
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2025-26
“While At Eyecare Associates, My Dead Mother Walks In”
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2025-26
“A Late Night Frittata on Lancaster Street”
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2027
“Finding Myself Elsewhere: My Impaired, Appalachian Self”
Appalachian Disability Anthology, ed. Kendra Winchester · University Press of Kentucky
Scholarship & Talks
In December of 2026, Todd will present “Grant Writing in the Age of AI: Practical Training for Producers” at the NY Farm Bureau StaCon. He read from Mary and Etta at the Appalachian Literary Arts & Storytelling Festival in 2024. Todd presented “The Juggler and the Pugilist: Two Marietta Icons Consider Life in the Pandemic” at the NCTE Annual Conference in Columbus, OH (2023) and a paper on disability and ecocriticism in Wall-E at the Midwest Popular Culture Association’s annual conference in Chicago (2022).
In 2020, Todd co-edited, with Dr. Christine Junker, a double thematic issue of Studies in the Humanities focused on the intersection of disability studies and ecocriticism. Click the below link to my professional portfolio to see a complete list of scholarly work.
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