About

Michaux Dempster is an Associate Professor of Focused Inquiry at Virginia Commonwealth University. She holds an M.Ed. in School Counseling from Auburn University, an MA in Writing and Rhetoric and an MFA in Creative Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she was the first recipient of the David Baldacci Fiction Fellowship. Her scholarly work is published in the International Journal of Higher Education, the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching and the North Carolina Literary Review; she has fiction in Millennium, Trust and Treachery: Tales of Power and Intrigue, and Feels Blind Literary; and has been a regular reviewer for Blackbird, VCU's online journal of literature and the arts. Michaux has been awarded the VCU Humanities Travel Research Grant for her work on her historical-fantasy novel-in-progress, “Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Fairy Melusine”; in 2022 she was a Harris Manchester Summer Research Fellow at Oxford University for her work on the letters of 20th-century fiction writer Peter Hillsman Taylor, and in 2024 she received a Global Education Program Development Award to establish a summer study abroad trip at Cambridge University. This project came to fruition in the summer of 2025, when she co-led the first group of VCU students to study literature, culture and writing at Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Education

• M.Ed.- School Counseling, Auburn University
• M.A.- Writing & Rhetoric, Virginia Commonwealth University
• M.F.A.- Creative Writing, Virginia Commonwealth University