Jodie Childers is a writer and documentary filmmaker based in Charlottesville, VA, and Queens, NY. Her interests include 20th-century American studies, cultural McCarthyism, Icelandic literature, and Cold War political rhetoric. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, where she teaches courses in the Writing and Rhetoric Program. Her teaching specialties include documentary film, place-based pedagogy, and digital writing. She has also taught at Tulane University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Queensborough Community College, and Brooklyn College.

She produced the documentary film The Other Parade, which aired on RTÉ in Ireland. Her documentary feature Down by the Riverside tells the story of Pete Seeger’s environmental legacy and had its world premiere at The Woodstock Film Festival. The film was also an official selection for the Athens International Film & Video Festival, the Capital City Film Festival, and the Berkshire International Film Festival. She has published her research in the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Comparative American Studies, Transatlantica, Resources for American Literary Studies, Jacobin, U.S. Studies Online, Boulevard, Middle West Review, and The Hopkins Review, among others. In 2018, she was awarded the Leifur Eiríksson Foundation Fellowship to pursue independent research and language study in Reykjavík, Iceland.

Her creative work has been featured in Poetry East, Appalachian Reckoning, the Journal of Working-Class Studies, Feral Feminisms, Portland Review, Slippery Elm, Eleven Eleven, Red Wheelbarrow, Northern Appalachia Review, and elsewhere. She received the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Himan Brown Award, Second Prize in the Ledge Fiction Contest, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train Open Fiction Contest. She has also been a finalist for the Tennessee Williams Festival Fiction Contest, the Slippery Elm Poetry Contest, the William Richey Short Fiction Contest, and the International Rita Dove Poetry Award. She holds a Ph.D. in English with a concentration in American studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College.