Bronwyn T. Williams, Director

Any time you move you have dreams about how your life may be in a new space. Yet you never know what the reality will look like, so you go forward with your fingers crossed and hope for the best. Looking back on our first full year in our new space on the first floor of Ekstrom Library, it’s gratifying to see how many of our hopes have been realized and how excited we are to continue this work in the year ahead. We had hoped that the new, larger, space for the University Writing Center would both make us more visible and offer us more room in which to hold consultations, events, and other activities that would foster and celebrate a culture of writing on campus. All of that has happened, and more.

In Fall 2016, we set a record for the number of one-on-one consultations in a single semester (and we may be headed for a record for spring semester as well). Thousands of writers at UofL come to see us, and come back again, because they feel they’re engaging in productive conversations about

writing that help them grow as writers. The writers who come to the University Writing Center represent every college in the university and include undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff. It takes an extraordinary staff to work with so many different writers from different disciplines who bring distinctive and individual concerns about writing to their appointments. So, while it’s great to have a shiny new space, it is our talented and dedicated writing consultants and the inspired teaching they do, day after day, that are at the heart of our work.

One of our other goals for our new space was to be able to hold writing-related events and sponsor writing groups, and that is another of our dreams that we have been able to realize. We’ve held a range of events, from a Halloween Creative Writing Open Mic night, to celebrating the National Day on Writing and International Mother

Language Day , to doing our part to participate in events such as Banned Books Week, Kick Back in the Stacks, and the Celebration of Student Writing.

We also want the University Writing Center to be a place where people can come to do their writing, so in the past year we have expanded our sponsorship of writing groups. In addition to continuing our Graduate Student Writing group and LGBTQ Writing Group, we added a very successful Creative Writing Group this year. We will be continuing all of this groups, so be sure to check our our website for information and dates.

It’s also worth noting that not all of our work takes place inside the University Writing Center space. In the last year we have conducted writing workshops across both UofL campuses that have served more than 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students. If you would like to request a workshop, you can contact us through our website or by email. We also collaborated with the Digital Media Suite on workshops to support faculty teaching. In the digital world, our social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram continued to grow. And this blog, with its combination of posts about writing and writing pedagogy and our ongoing How I Write series, continues to increase in popularity, with more than 12,000 hits this year.

We also have expanded our community literacy work this year. In addition to holding regular writing workshops and consultations at Family Scholar House, we have begun a partnership with the Western Branch of the Louisville Free Public Library. At the Western Branch Library we’ll be working with young people, both through literacy tutoring as well as organizing a variety of writing-focused activities. You can read more about these partnerships in this blog post.

It is important that credit goes to the fantastic administrative staff who are the brains and heart of the University Writing Center and support UofL writers in so many ways, both large and small. Associate Director Cassandra Book, Assistant directors, Layne Gordon, Amy Nichols, Jessica Newman, and Chris Scheidler handle every opportunity or challenge with creativity and good humor. Robin Blackett runs the front desk, with the help of our student workers Brianna McIntyre and Bailey O’Leary,  with warmth and professionalism.

Whatever we do, we are committed to always putting writers and their writing first. We work to make the University Writing Center an inclusive and safe space where all writers can explore their ideas. We want writers to know that we will respond respectfully and thoughtfully to their work, and that we can learn from them as they learn from us. Such a reciprocal and collaborative relationship is essential to our the work we do. So I want to end by thanking the writers who have trusted us with their writing and their ideas this year.

We will be open during the summer, starting May 8, from 9-4 every weekday. Meanwhile, take a look at our website and we hope to see you soon.

Writing Center Staff Achievements

The University Writing Center is also an active site of scholarship about the teaching of writing. Staff from the Writing Center were engaged in a number of scholarly projects during the past year in rhetoric and composition, literature, and creative writing.

Cassandra Book, Associate Director of the University Writing Center, presented at the International Writing Center Association Conference, Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, and International Writing Center Association Collaborative at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. She was also awarded a the Christine Cozzens Research Grant by The Southeastern Writing Center Association for the project “Online Writing Tutoring: Usability, Access, and Participation.” She also published a book review in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication of Tracy Bridgeford and Kirk St. Amant’s Academic-Industry Relationships and Partnerships: Perspectives for Technical Communicators and co-authored a post on the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition Blog on “Teaching and Researching Feminist Rhetorics: Digital Curation as Collaborative Archival Method.”

Layne Gordon, Assistant Director for the Writing Center, presented at Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition and the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference and co-authored an article titled “On Multimodal Composing.” in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.

Jessica Newman, Assistant Director for Graduate Student Writing, presented at the International Writing Center Association Conference, Cultural Rhetorics Conference, and Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Amy Nichols, Assistant Director for the Writing Center, presented at the Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition and co-authored a policy brief titled, “Charter Schools Not Just for K12 Advocacy,” in Policy Analysis Initiative. She also published the poems “For my men” in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel and “Cave Run Lake” and “Passing Through” in Appalachian Heritage.

Chris Scheidler, Assistant Director for the Virtual Writing Center, presented at the College Conference on Composition and Communication and participated in the Louisville “Hack The Ville” project focused on providing resources to help the     transition for refugee and immigrant populations.

Kevin Bailey co-edited the Miracle Monocle literary magazine and was awarded a Department of English Creative Writing Scholarship. He will be the Assistant Director of the Creative Writing program next year.

Kelly Carty will be the Morton Endowed Chair Research Assistant next year and will present at the South Central Modern Language Association Conference.

Emily Cousins presented at the Northeastern Modern Language Association Conference and was awarded U.S. Dept. of State’s Critical Language Scholarship to learn Bengali this summer.

Katie Kohls presented at the College English Association of Ohio Conference.

Carrie Mason was accepted to present at the national Community Writing Conference in October.

Michael Phillips presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 and the Kentucky Philological Association Conference. He is also the Henry James Review Research Assistant for next year.

Melissa Rothman completed her MA degree and defended her thesis, “Ironic Deference-An Inquiry into the Nineteenth Century Feminist Rhetoric of Kesiah Shelton”

Ashleigh Scarpinato gave readings of her poetry in the Flying Out Loud and River City Review creative writing series in Louisville.

Ashley Taylor founded the River City Revue Reading Series and read at the Flying Out Loud reading series. She also co-edited the Miracle Monocle literary magazine and was awarded a Department of English Creative Writing Scholarship. Her poems will be published in the following journals: “Shipwreck,” The Merrimack Review; “Shipwreck,” Lavender Review; “A clean void paints a silhouette where your dresser was,” The Stillwater Review; and “Botanical garden duplex” & “The Seamstress,” FIVE:2:ONE.

Finally, along with former University Writing Center staff members, Adam Robinson, Tika Lamsal, and Ashly Bender Smith, I co-authored an article “`Find Something You Know You Can Believe In’: The Effect of Dissertation Retreats on Graduate Students’ Identities as Writers” for the edited collection Re/Writing the Center: Pedagogies, Practices, Partnerships to Support Graduate Students in the Writing Center, to be published this summer. Also my forthcoming book, Literacy Practices and Perceptions of Agency: Composing Identities, draws in part from research conducted over the years at the University Writing Center.

• Working in the Writing Center