Candis Bond
Utah State University Press, 2026
Writing Center Administrators as Campus Leaders challenges the current erasure of the WCA role within discourse on campus leadership by highlighting the various ways these leaders have had transformative impacts on their institutions, emphasizing the wide range of knowledge, skills, and added value that WCAs bring to the university ecosystem.
Contributors from diverse institutions, institutional contexts, identity formations, and career paths theorize different forms of leadership from within and beyond writing centers. The first section brings together perspectives on leadership theory and practice, focusing on the practical gains offered and challenges afforded via writing center professional pathways. The second section emphasizes partnerships and networks forged through intentional and creative leadership models. In the final section, contributors consider the emotional and affective dimensions of WCA labor, offering multiple roadmaps for WCAs to transition their experiences into more recognition, resources, and broader administrative roles while underscoring the potential of inclusive, community-focused leadership for current and aspiring WCAs.
Providing key insights and practical examples, Writing Center Administrators as Campus Leaders validates and inspires current and future WCAs and informs university administrators on the ways that WCAs can and do impact higher education as true campus leaders.
Steven J. Corbett
Utah State University Press, 2022
Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison
Utah State University Press, 2023
Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan
Utah State University Press, 2011
Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan have created a rich resource for writing center tutors, administrators, and scholars. Motivated by a scholarly interest in race, literacy, and pedagogy, and by an ethical commitment to antiracism work, contributors address a series of related questions: How does institutionalized racism in American education shape the culture of literacy and language education in the writing center? How does racism operate in the discourses of writing center scholarship and lore, and in what ways are writing centers unwittingly complicit in racist practices? How can they meaningfully operationalize antiracist work? How do they persevere through the difficulty and messiness of negotiating race and racism in their daily practice?
The conscientious, nuanced attention to race in Writing Centers and the New Racism is meant to model what it means to be bold in engagement with these hard questions and to spur the kind of sustained, productive, multivocal, and challenging dialogue that, with a few important exceptions, has been absent from the field.
Holly Hassel
Utah State University Press, 2026
Despite the adage “there are no writing emergencies,” at times situations invite or require immediate written response. In a modern era of social media and with the constancy of “crisis,” knowing when, how, and why to respond quickly is increasingly important. In Writing Emergencies, a diverse group of authors contribute scholarly, narrative-based discussions of writing emergencies, descriptions of more and less successful strategies, and a reflective conclusion that offers implications for writing studies praxis and theory.
In this collection, contributors demonstrate the reality of writing emergencies—in their own writing lives, classrooms, and programs—and they offer both self- and community-focused approaches for response. Chapters focus on discernment and prioritization, recognizing that all stressors are not necessarily emergencies. Instead, expanding our vocabulary for (and subsequent understanding) of the kinds of difficulties we come across can build our professional capacity and support greater career sustainability. The volume also illustrates the role of coalitions in navigating writing emergencies and how purposefully building and activating these coalitions subverts some challenges before they become emergencies, particularly those that are recurrent or manufactured.
Writing Emergencies both names and grapples with writing emergencies and offers insights for capacity-building in the acts of filtering and prioritizing competing urgent demands. The findings are meaningful for all leaders, students, and teachers who center care in their relationships with others.
Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Linda Adler-Kassner
University Press of Colorado, 2023
In Writing Expertise, Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle address the question, “How can instructors across disciplines best help students write well?” Drawing on research about how disciplines use writing to engage in shared ways of thinking, practicing, and demonstrating knowledge, the authors offer an approach that helps faculty across the disciplines invite students to bring new ideas and identities to their work. Throughout the book, Adler-Kassner and Wardle help instructors explore what it means to write well in their courses, fields, or disciplines and offer strategies and activities that can help them improve their assignments by infusing research-based writing activities into their courses.
Writing Expertise provides an innovative, equity- and research-based approach to writing in the disciplines that will enrich instructor and student thinking. Thoughtful discussions and well-designed activities provide the support needed to help instructors put disciplinary thinking into written form, develop systematic aways of learning about the students who write in their courses, and ultimately develop more effective, inclusive courses.
Judy K. Morris
University of Illinois Press, 2001
Janet Burroway, with Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Ned Stuckey-French
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Peggy Veljkovic
Templeton Press, 2000
Writing from the Heart offers us a unique window into what young people have learned about life. This collection of essays captures the values that matter most to teens—values such as love, perseverance, family, and helping others—in their own words. As the young writers reflect on their own experience, readers of all ages will be inspired by their wisdom and hope.
Amy J. Devitt
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008
In Writing Genres, Amy J. Devitt examines genre from rhetorical, social, linguistic, professional, and historical perspectives and explores genre's educational uses, making this volume the most comprehensive view of genre theory today.
Writing Genres does not limit itself to literary genres or to ideas of genres as formal conventions but additionally provides a theoretical definition of genre as rhetorical, dynamic, and flexible, which allows scholars to examine the role of genres in academic, professional, and social communities.
Writing Genres demonstrates how genres function within their communities rhetorically and socially, how they develop out of their contexts historically, how genres relate to other types of norms and standards in language, and how genres nonetheless enable creativity. Devitt also advocates a critical genre pedagogy based on these ideas and provides a rationale for first-year writing classes grounded in teaching antecedent genres.
Sara Wilder
Utah State University Press, 2025
Anne Ruggles Gere
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987
Drawing upon previously unpublished archival materials as well as historical accounts, Gere traces the history of writing groups in America, from their origins over a century ago to their recent reappearance in the works of Macrorie, Elbow, Murray, and others.
From this historical perspective Gere examines the theoretical foundations of writing groups, challenging the traditional concept of writing as an individual performance. She offers instead a broader view of authorship that includes both individual and social dimensions, with implications not only for the teaching of composition but also for theories of rhetoric and literacy.
Eli Goldblatt
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012
James A. Berlin. Foreword by Donald C. Stuart
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984
Defining a rhetoric as a social invention arising out of a particular time, place, and set of circumstances, Berlin notes that “no rhetoric—not Plato’s or Aristotle’s or Quintilian’s or Perelman’s—is permanent.” At any given time several rhetorics vie for supremacy, with each attracting adherents representing various views of reality expressed through a rhetoric.
Traditionally rhetoric has been seen as based on four interacting elements: “reality, writer or speaker, audience, and language.” As emphasis shifts from one element to another, or as the interaction between elements changes, or as the definitions of the elements change, rhetoric changes. This alters prevailing views on such important questions as what is appearance, what is reality.
In this interpretive study Berlin classifies the three 19th-century rhetorics as classical, psychological-epistemological, and romantic, a uniquely American development growing out of the transcendental movement. In each case studying the rhetoric provides insight into society and the beliefs of the people.
Greg Giberson
Utah State University Press, 2015
The writing major is among the most exciting scenes in the evolving American university. Writing Majors is a collection of firsthand descriptions of the origins, growth, and transformations of eighteen different programs. The chapters provide useful administrative insight, benchmark information, and even inspiration for new curricular configurations from a range of institutions.
A practical sourcebook for those who are building, revising, or administering their own writing majors , this volume also serves as a historical archive of a particular instance of growth and transformation in American higher education. Revealing bureaucratic, practical, and institutional matters as well as academic ideals and ideologies, each profile includes sections providing a detailed program review and rationale, an implementation narrative, and reflection and prospection about the program.
Documenting eighteen stories of writing major programs in various stages of formation, preservation, and reform and exposing the contingencies of their local and material constitution, Writing Majors speaks as much to the “how to” of building writing major programs as to the larger “what,” “why,” and “how” of institutional growth and change.
Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, & Geoffrey Sirc
Utah State University Press, 2004
As new media mature, the changes they bring to writing in college are many and suggest implications not only for the tools of writing, but also for the contexts, personae, and conventions of writing. An especially visible change has been the increase of visual elements-from typographic flexibility to the easy use and manipulation of color and images. Another would be in the scenes of writing-web sites, presentation "slides," email, online conferencing and coursework, even help files, all reflect non-traditional venues that new media have brought to writing. By one logic, we must reconsider traditional views even of what counts as writing; a database, for example, could be a new form of written work.
The authors of Writing New Media bring these ideas and the changes they imply for writing instruction to the audience of rhetoric/composition scholars. Their aim is to expand the college writing teacher's understanding of new media and to help teachers prepare students to write effectively with new media beyond the classroom. Each chapter in the volume includes a lengthy discussion of rhetorical and technological background, and then follows with classroom-tested assignments from the authors' own teaching.
Brad Jacobson
Utah State University Press, 2026
Writing Opportunities presents in-depth text histories illustrating the interrelationship of writing, identities, and belonging in college writing transitions. Drawing on more than two years of research with three Latinx/a/o students transitioning from the same high school class to the local university, Brad Jacobson brings together analyses of interview transcripts, student writing, classroom genres, and institutional policies to foreground a sense of belonging as central to writing development and learning.
Including interviews with students and their instructors, Jacobson traces writing opportunities that Hercules, Jain, and Lucy were afforded as they transitioned from high school to college writing, particularly in general education courses. Chapters attend to multiple levels of interaction to show how policies, practices, and social histories can impact opportunities for learning. With attention to dominant discourses of writing that narrow what counts as good writing as well as positive opportunity structures that extend possibilities for identification, engagement, and deep learning, Jacobson also posits writing as an opportunity for writers to explore possibilities for who we are and who we may become.
Jacobson’s humanizing research invites readers to consider opportunity from multiple perspectives and shows how subtle shifts in relationships among students, instructors, and institutions can increase meaningful learning and provide a sense of belonging in educational contexts.
Richard A. Watson
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992
Richard A. ("Red") Watson has published fiction, general nonfiction, and scholarly books. His essay "On the Zeedijk," about Descartes in Holland and first published in The Georgia Review, was the lead essay in The Pushcart Prize XV, 1990–1991: Best of the Small Presses. Red knows writing.
He also knows academe and has written Writing Philosophy as a kind of survival manual for undergraduates, graduate students, and junior faculty members in philosophy. Also helpful to those in the humanities and the social sciences, the book is a guide to the professional writing and publishing that are essential to an active participation in the conversation and discussion that constitute these professional fields. To the extent that publication is the crucial factor in tenure decisions, it will help the beginning scholar meet tenure criteria.
Despite the importance of the oral tradition in philosophy and the influence of the dialogue, many philosophical points are so intricate and complex that they can be advanced, followed, and criticized only if they are written as stepwise arguments for study and contemplation at length and at leisure. Watson provides a set of basic principles and a plan for writing argumentative papers of 1,500 to 15,000 words (3 to 30 printed pages) and books containing a sequence of sustained arguments of 70,000 to 150,000 words (200 to 300 printed pages).
Because the first book of most professional philosophers is a revised dissertation, Watson presents a plan for writing that dissertation in such a way that its chapters will serve as publishable articles and the dissertation itself will need very little rewriting as a book. His discussion of the principles of reason, clarity, and argument ranges from such topics as dangling participles and the proper usage of ellipses to matters of categorization and univocity.
Jessica Nastal
University Press of Colorado, 2023
Bryna Siegel Finer
Utah State University Press, 2017
Writing Program Architecture offers an unprecedented abundance of information concerning the significant material, logistical, and rhetorical features of writing programs. Presenting the realities of thirty diverse and award-winning programs, contributors to the volume describe reporting lines, funding sources, jurisdictions, curricula, and other critical programmatic matters and provide insight into their program histories, politics, and philosophies.
Each chapter opens with a program snapshot that includes summary demographic and historical information and then addresses the profile of the WPA, program conception, population served, funding, assessment, technology, curriculum, and more. The architecture of the book itself makes comparison across programs and contexts easy, not only among the programs described in each chapter but also between the program in any given chapter and the reader’s own program. An online web companion to the book includes access to the primary documents that have been of major importance to the development or sustainability of the program, described in a “Primary Document” section of each chapter.
The metaphor of architecture allows us to imagine the constituent parts of a writing program as its foundation, beams, posts, scaffolding—the institutional structures that, alongside its people, anchor a program to the ground and keep it standing. The most extensive resource on program structure available to the field, Writing Program Architecture illuminates structural choices made by leaders of exemplary programs around the United States and provides an authoritative source of standard practice that a WPA might use to articulate programmatic choices to higher administration.
Contributors: Susan Naomi Bernstein, Remica Bingham-Risher, Brent Chappelow, Malkiel Choseed, Angela Clark-Oates, Patrick Clauss, Emily W. Cosgrove, Thomas Deans, Bridget Draxler, Leigh Ann Dunning, Greg A. Giberson, Maggie Griffin Taylor, Paula Harrington, Sandra Jamieson, Marshall Kitchens, Michael Knievel, Amy Lannin, Christopher LeCluyse, Sarah Liggett, Deborah Marrott, Mark McBeth, Tim McCormack, John McCormick, Heather McGrew, Heather McKay, Heidi A. McKee, Julianne Newmark, Lori Ostergaard, Joannah Portman-Daley, Jacqueline Preston, James P. Purdy, Ben Rafoth, Dara Regaignon, Nedra Reynolds, Shirley Rose, Bonnie Selting, Stacey Sheriff, Steve Simpson, Patricia Sullivan, Kathleen Tonry, Sanford Tweedie, Meg Van Baalen-Wood, Shevaun Watson, Christy I. Wenger, Lisa Wilkinson, Candace Zepeda
Anne E. Greene
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Anne E. Greene
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Edited by Lee Nickoson and Mary P. Sheridan, Foreword by Gesa E. Kirsch
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012
An essential reference for students and scholars exploring the methods and methodologies of writing research.
What does it mean to research writing today? What are the practical and theoretical issues researchers face when approaching writing as they do? What are the gains or limitations of applying particular methods, and what might researchers be overlooking? These questions and more are answered by the writing research field’s leading scholars in Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies.
Editors Nickoson and Sheridan gather twenty chapters from leaders in writing research, spanning topics from ethical considerations for researchers, quantitative methods, and activity analysis to interviewing and communitybased and Internet research. While each chapter addresses a different subject, the volume as a whole covers the range of methodologies, technologies, and approaches—both old and new—that writing researchers use, and examines the ways in which contemporary writing research is understood, practiced, and represented.
An essential reference for experienced researchers and an invaluable tool to help novices understand research methods and methodologies, Writing Studies Research in Practice includes established methods and knowledge while addressing the contemporary issues, interests, and concerns faced by writing researchers today.
Federico Navarro
University Press of Colorado, 2026
This edited collection arises from the belief that the field of writing studies, with its deep engagement in the power of language, is uniquely positioned to open new pathways for international scholarly dialogue in writing studies and beyond. Integrating diverse theoretical traditions—including discourse studies, language pedagogy, educational psychology, educational management, and critical sociolinguistics—the editors have brought together work from key Latin American scholars published over the past two decades. The result is a book that points to future directions for the increasingly global field of writing studies. The collection includes work by Natalia Ávila Reyes, Charles Bazerman, Paula Carlino, Valentina Fahler, Ivone Inés Jakob, Judith Kalman, Angela B. Kleiman, Vera Lúcia Lopes Cristovão, Anna Rachel Machado, Jonathan Marine, Juan David Martínez Hincapié, Paulina Meza, Violate Molina Natera, Désirée Motta-Roth, Estela I. Moyano, Elvira Narvaja de Arnoux, Lucía Natale, Federico Navarro, Giovanni Parodi, Luisa Pelizza, María Cecilia Pereira, Pablo Rosales, Daniela Paula Stagnaro, Alicia Vázquez, René Venegas, and Virginia Zavala.
Amy Fish
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024
Between 1967 and 1972, a previously obscure group of authors entered the US cultural spotlight. During this five-year period, at least thirty anthologies of poetry and prose by African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American children came out of adult-led workshops, classrooms, and sites of juvenile incarceration. Mass-market publishers, independent imprinters, and local mimeograph machines produced volumes with titles such as I Am Somebody! and The Me Nobody Knows: Children’s Voices from the Ghetto. These young writers actively participated in the Black Arts Movement, and some collaborated with well-known adult authors, most prominently June Jordan. Their anthologies gained national media coverage, occasionally became bestsellers, were quoted by James Baldwin, and even inspired a hit Broadway musical. While writings by children had long attracted adult attention, this flurry of youth writing and publishing was distinguished by the widespread belief that children of color from poor and working-class neighborhoods were uniquely able to speak truth about American racism and inequality.
Focusing on Black and Latinx youth authorship within New York City, and using deep archival research and elegant close readings, Amy Fish examines child-authored texts of this era within the context of their literary production and reception. These young writers were often supervised and edited by white adults, raising concerns about the authenticity and agency of their voices. Fish contends that young authors themselves shared these concerns and that they employed savvy rhetorical strategies of address, temporality, and trope to self-consciously interrogate the perils and possibilities of their adult-influenced work. Young writers thus contributed to the era’s important debates about the nature of authorship and readership within a racist society, while also using their writing as an intimate occasion of self-discovery.
Rachael Cayley, Fiona Coll, and Daniel Aureliano Newman
University of Michigan Press, 2025
edited by Pat Belanoff, Marcia Dickson, Sheryl I. Fontaine, & Charles Moran
Utah State University Press, 2002
Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, eds.
Duke University Press, 1994
Contributors. Elizabeth Hill Boone, Tom Cummins, Stephen Houston, Mark B. King, Dana Leibsohn, Walter D. Mignolo, John Monaghan, John M. D. Pohl, Joanne Rappaport, Peter van der Loo
Jim Henry
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000
In Writing Workplace Cultures: An Archaeology of Professional Writing, Jim Henry analyzes eighty-three workplace writing ethnographies composed over seven years in a variety of organizations. He views the findings as so many shards in an archaeology on professional writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
These ethnographies were composed by either practicing or aspiring writers participating in a Master’s program in professional writing and editing. Henry solicited the writers' participation in "informed intersubjective research" focused on issues and questions of their own determination. Most writers studied their own workplace, composing "auto-ethnographies" that problematize these workplaces' local cultures even as they depict writing practices within them.
Henry establishes links between current professional writing practices and composition instruction as both were shaped by national economic development and local postsecondary reorganization throughout the twentieth century. He insists that if we accept basic principles of social constructionism, the text demonstrates ways in which writers "write" workplace cultures to produce goods and services whose effects go far beyond the immediate needs of its clients.
Wendy Laura Belcher
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Angela Brintlinger
Northwestern University Press, 2008
In <i>Writing a Usable Past</i>, Brintlinger considers the interactions of post-Revolutionary Russian and emigre culture with the genre of biography in its various permutations, arguing that in the years after the Revolution, Russian writers looked to the great literary figures of the past to help them construct a post-Revolutionary present. In detailed looks at the biographical writing of Yuri Tynianov, Vladislav Khodasevich, and Mikhail Bulgakov, Brintlinger follows each author's successful biography/ies and their failed attempts at biographies of Alexander Pushkin on the centennial anniversary of his death. Brintlinger compares the Pushkin biographies to the other biographies examined, and in a concluding chapter she considers other, more successful commemorations of the great poet's death. She argues that popular commemorations--exhibits, concerts, special issues of journals--were a more fitting biography than the genre of the "usable past." For post-revolutionary cultural actors, including Tynianov, Khodasevich, and Bulgakov, Pushkin was a symbol rather than a model for constructing that usable past.
Kathleen Yancey
Utah State University Press, 2014
Addressing how composers transfer both knowledge about and practices of writing, Writing across Contexts explores the grounding theory behind a specific composition curriculum called Teaching for Transfer (TFT) and analyzes the efficacy of the approach. Finding that TFT courses aid students in transfer in ways that other kinds of composition courses do not, the authors demonstrate that the content of this curriculum, including its reflective practice, provides a unique set of resources for students to call on and repurpose for new writing tasks.
The authors provide a brief historical review, give attention to current curricular efforts designed to promote such transfer, and develop new insights into the role of prior knowledge in students' ability to transfer writing knowledge and practice, presenting three models of how students respond to and use new knowledge—assemblage, remix, and critical incident.
A timely and significant contribution to the field, Writing across Contexts will be of interest to graduate students, composition scholars, WAC and writing-in-the-disciplines scholars, and writing program administrators.
Anita Jarczok
Ohio University Press, 2017
Anaïs Nin, the diarist, novelist, and provocateur, occupied a singular space in twentieth-century culture, not only as a literary figure and voice of female sexual liberation but as a celebrity and symbol of shifting social mores in postwar America. Before Madonna and her many imitators, there was Nin; yet, until now, there has been no major study of Nin as a celebrity figure.
In Writing an Icon, Anita Jarczok reveals how Nin carefully crafted her literary and public personae, which she rewrote and restyled to suit her needs and desires. When the first volume of her diary was published in 1966, Nin became a celebrity, notorious beyond the artistic and literary circles in which she previously had operated. Jarczok examines the ways in which the American media appropriated and deconstructed Nin and analyzes the influence of Nin’s guiding hand in their construction of her public persona.
The key to understanding Nin’s celebrity in its shifting forms, Jarczok contends, is the Diary itself, the principal vehicle through which her image has been mediated. Combining the perspectives of narrative and cultural studies, Jarczok traces the trajectory of Nin’s celebrity, the reception of her writings. The result is an innovative investigation of the dynamic relationships of Nin’s writing, identity, public image, and consumer culture.
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 1978
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 1980
Christopher A. Rollston
SBL Press, 2010

Frauke Matthes
University of London Press, 2012

Carol Smallwood
American Library Association, 2009
Rajyashree Pandey
University of Michigan Press, 1998
S.E. Wilmer
University of Iowa Press, 2004
Joanne Addison
University Press of Colorado, 2017

Mererid Puw Davies
University of London Press, 2016
Ilya Kutik
Northwestern University Press, 2005
Spencer Schaffner
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Paul M. Rogers
University Press of Colorado, 2023
Emily Isaacs
Utah State University Press, 2017
Writing at the State U presents a comprehensive, empirical examination of writing programs at 106 universities. Rather than using open survey calls and self-reporting, Emily Isaacs uses statistical analysis to show the extent to which established principles of writing instruction and administration have been implemented at state comprehensive universities, the ways in which writing at those institutions has differed from writing at other institutions over time, and how state institutions have responded to major scholarly debates concerning first-year composition and writing program administration.
Isaacs’s findings are surprising: state university writing programs give lip service to important principles of writing research, but many still emphasize grammar instruction and a skills-based approach, classes continue to be outsized, faculty development is optional, and orientation toward basic writing is generally remedial. As such, she considers where a closer match between writing research and writing instruction might help to expose and remedy these difficulties and identifies strategies and areas where faculty or writing program administrators are empowered to enact change.
Unique in its wide scope and methodology, Writing at the State U sheds much-needed light on the true state of the writing discipline at state universities and demonstrates the advantages of more frequent and rigorous quantitative studies of the field.
Howard S. Becker
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Howard S. Becker
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo
University of Alabama Press, 2006