Brittany R. Collins, M.Ed., is an author, educator, and speaker working at the intersections of trauma-informed practice, disability justice, mental health advocacy, and teaching. 

She is the author of Learning from Loss: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Supporting Grieving Students (Heinemann/Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt) and over 50 peer-reviewed and public-facing articles in The Washington Post; The Boston Globe; The Hechinger Report; Inside Higher Ed; Greater Good Magazine; Education Week; Edutopia; Teach Thought; English Journal and Literacy & NCTE of the National Council of Teachers of English; NCTE’s Special Issues Volume, Trauma-Informed Teaching: Toward Responsive, Humanizing Classrooms; Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Usable Knowledge; Suleika Jaouad’s Isolation Journals; Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global; Brevity blog; Dana Farber Cancer Institute; and We Need Diverse Books, among other outlets. She is a Contributing Editor at Edutopia, where she covers the school leader beat and has supported over 150 freelance writers. She has also served as a Reviewer at Columbia University’s Teachers College Press; Harvard Review; New England Review; and English Teaching: Practice and Critique.

With a passion for connecting theory and practice in an effort to foster collaborative relationships with students, teachers, and writers, Brittany has enjoyed designing and delivering curricula, educational programming, and professional development sessions through Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education; Columbia University; New York University; Smith College; Boston University; PBS Learning Media; Heinemann Professional Development Services; Race Project Kansas City; Write the World; the How Kids Learn Foundation; the Public Education and Business Coalition; Clark County Children’s Mental Health Consortium; Zionsville Community Schools; School Crisis Recovery and Renewal/National Child Traumatic Stress Network; the National Association of Social Workers (New York chapter); and the National Council for the Social Studies.

Currently, Brittany is working on two books: the first, Leveraging AI for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Social-Emotional Learning, is for teachers and is forthcoming with Routledge, co-authored w/ Dr. Marlee Bunch. The second explores how women-identifying individuals adapt to three underrepresented yet prevalent disabilities—dysautonomia, long COVID, and ME/CFS—and is under review.

Brittany studied English and Education at Smith College and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Creative Nonfiction at the Yale Writer’s Workshop; and holds a Certificate in Traumatic Stress Studies from the Trauma Research Foundation. She earned her M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction, Social-Emotional Learning, from the University of Virginia, where she received a high pass on her thesis, “Problematizing Behavioral Emphases in Social-Emotional Learning Programs: A Call for Bioecological Considerations in Equity-Centered Implementation.”