Dr. Kris Messer is an Associate Professor of English at the Community College of Baltimore County, as well a co-coordinator for Service Learning. She has studied and published on writing placement, reading, community-based assessment and pedagogy. Her work has been most recently published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and the Journal of Writing Assessment. She has been working to center student experiences through community engagement since 2017.

This award is in recognition of Dr. Messer's outstanding commitment to integrating service-learning into the curriculum and your transformative impact on students and community partners with the Community College of Baltimore County. Since 2017, Dr. Messer has designed transparent, reflective, and community-centered experiences in her English courses that help students connect writing with active citizenship—partnering with organizations such as Beans and Bread, the International Rescue Committee, and Sarah’s Hope to explore issues of hunger, homelessness, and immigration through direct engagement and academic inquiry. Through Dr. Messer's leadership, she has deepened CCBC’s civic mission and cultivated a generation of students who not only find their voices in the classroom but also use them to strengthen their communities