Rachel Kaminski Sanders graduated from Florida State University in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in Apparel Design and Technology. Rachel completed her senior internship at the showroom of Donghia, a luxury home furnishings company, where she studied textile design. After college, Rachel moved to New York City to pursue a career in the fashion industry. She had the opportunity to work with the fashion department at InStyle magazine, which led to a position in the communications department at Bottega Veneta. At Bottega, she worked with a number of national publications and often traveled to Milan for Fashion Week. But it was through working with interns from local universities that Rachel discovered a desire to teach.

She moved back to South Carolina in 2010 to attend graduate school at Clemson University, where she earned a Master of Arts in Teaching English and Social Studies for Grades 5-9. Rachel landed her first teaching job at a public arts magnet school. There, she taught seventh grade writing for three years before deciding to pursue a Ph.D. In 2018, Rachel earned her Ph.D. in Language and Literacy Education from the University of Georgia after writing a next-generation dissertation, one without text. As an artist, fashion designer, and educator, she seeks to expand the types of scholarly research writing accepted in higher education, an area she believes is essential to the advancement of academic research.

In 2019, Dr. Sanders began a tenure-track faculty position as an Assistant Professor of Literacy Education in the Department of Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching at the University of Texas in San Antonio, designated with academic and research excellence as a Carnegie R1 institution and as a Hispanic Serving Institution by the United States Department of Education. For three years, she taught undergraduate and graduate courses focusing on new literacies and writing. Dr. Sanders also served as the director of the San Antonio Writing Project, an official site of the National Writing Project, based on the belief that teachers are the best teachers of other teachers.

She accepted a visiting faculty position in the College of Education and Human Development at Clemson University in the fall of 2022 so that she could continue to work remotely during the 22/23 academic year, which best suited her preference for a nomadic lifestyle. Dr. Sanders has an established research agenda focused on new literacies, particularly the production (writing) rather than consumption (reading) of information, and the increased attention that needs to be paid to the teaching of writing.