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Good News!

Three composition books, the words "Good News" and the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies' logo

Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies Update

September 2022

Hello Writers!

A note from our Department Chair LuMing Mao:

I hope the fall semester is off to a great start for every one of you and you are now settled in your daily routine of things.

Meanwhile, I have some very good news to share with you and colleagues and friends to congratulate. ...

Please continue to send your Good News stories my way. 

Best, 

LuMing

 

Christie Toth

Our colleague Christie Toth, together with Jessica Nastal and Mya Poe, has a new edited collection out by the WAC Clearinghouse, titled Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges: The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education. The book is part of the Practices & Possibilities book series .

Here is the brief description of the book: 

Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges brings together two-year college teacher-scholar-activists from across the U.S. to share stories, strategies, and data about local efforts at reforming writing placement assessment to advance educational access and equity. The chapters in this edited collection help faculty and writing program administrators navigate the shifting landscape of placement in the 2020s. Contributors demonstrate how two-year colleges have addressed local and state-level pressures for reform, especially at a time when the nation has been rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic with its inequitable economic, social, and physical toll.  This book, like other books published by the Clearinghouse, will be available in a print edition from University Press of Colorado in the coming months. 

Romeo García

Our colleague Romeo García participated as a panelist in September’s Reframing the Conversation, titled “Practicing Academic Freedom and Free Speech.” Check it out, please, if you were not able to attend.

 

Natalie Stillman-Webb

Our colleague Natalie Stillman-Webb, together with Jennifer Cunningham et al., her research team, recently published “Synchronicity over Modality: Understanding Hybrid and Online Writing Students’ Experiences with Peer Review” in Composition Forum. Together with the same team, Natalie has placed another essay, titled “How and What Students Learn in Hybrid and Online FYC: A Multi-Institutional Survey Study of Student Perceptions” in College Composition and Communication (73:4, 2022). Natalie has also been selected to serve on the University Teaching Committee for 3 years ending on August 1, 2025.

Max Werner

Our Colleague Max Werner has placed his essay, “Pound’s “New Found Orchid”: The Poetics of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” in the upcoming issue of the Ezra Pound Society journal Make It New. Meanwhile, his latest book, Wolves, Grizzlies, and Greenhorns: Death and Coexistence in the American West, recently received high praise in a book review published in Western American Literature. The reviewer characterizes Max’s book as “a fine work of nature and an exposé of the writer’s soul (and perhaps our own).”

Lisa Shaw

Our staff colleague Lisa Shaw as department senior academic advisor worked very hard this summer, as she always does, to provide timely and expert assistance for academic advisors and the incoming freshmen as the university instituted a new (metering) system to manage WRTG 1010 and 2010 courses.

Bobbi Davis, Director of CSBS (College of Social and Behavioral Science) Student Success Center, sent me a glowing testimonial praising Lisa, who, as she said,

“is always there to answer mine and students’ questions quickly and effectively. Something that is not an easy task when most of our 1st year students staring at the U this fall are wanting/needing to register for 1010 or 2010. I don’t know how she manages it, all the while being so supportive and positive.”

THANKS, LISA!!!

Last Updated: 9/29/22