Jess Willis

Jess Willis is originally from Maryland and is still a Marylander at heart. After getting her B.A. in Applied Linguistics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), she spent a year doing environmental conservation for the state park service as an AmeriCorps member. Life brought her to Atlanta, and soon after the move, she left for an English Teaching Assistantship in Sri Lanka via the Fulbright Program. While working at an NGO in the tea plantations of Sri Lanka, Jess fell in love with teaching such vibrant, dedicated students. Here, she decided she wanted to devote her career to developing students’ potential English and leadership skills. After the 2019 Easter bombings in Colombo, Jess was sent back to the US and took the opportunity to pursue her Master’s in Applied Linguistics & ESL at Georgia State University. Her research focus at GSU extended her undergraduate focus on the pragmatics of emotionally abusive language, as well as interrogated the long-term linguistic effects of childhood trauma. Jess has spent two years teaching and developing GSU’s new Community-Based English for Academic Purposes courses, and she has had the pleasure of teaching Atlanta-based students from all over the world.