Brad Hughes

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Brad Hughes has been Director of the Writing Center since 1984 and Director of WAC since 1990.  Brad feels very lucky to work as part of a team of 100 very talented, dedicated, and creative academic- and classified-staff colleagues, graduate teaching assistants, and undergraduate Writing Fellows, who collectively work with some 7000 undergraduate and graduate student-writers each year.  They also collaborate widely with faculty across campus.  Brad has published numerous articles about writing center and WAC teaching and administration, he has given over 70 conference papers, invited lectures, and featured and keynote addresses, and he has received numerous awards for his work.  Together with his colleague Emily Hall, he was the invited guest editor for a special issue (2008) of the WAC journal Across the Disciplines, featuring research on undergraduate Writing Fellows and WAC.  Together with Harvey Kail and Paula Gillespie, he co-developed the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project.  A co-founder of the National College Learning Center Association and past chair of the executive board of the Midwest Writing Centers Association, Brad is a member of the executive board of the National Writing Centers Research Project at the University of Louisville, has been a member of the IWCA's Accreditation and Assessment Committee, and has been a consultant and invited speaker about writing centers and WAC at many colleges and universities.  In the summer of 2003, Brad co-chaired—with Paula Gillespie—the inaugural IWCA summer institute, and in 2008, he again co-chaired the institute with Lisa Ede and Paula Gillespie.  He's thrilled to be part of the Temple institute and to work with Lori Salem and her colleagues!

Lori Salem

Lori Salem has been the director of the Writing Center at Temple University since 1999.  In this time, the Center morphed from a small stuck-in-the-basement operation, to a large window-rich Center with three full-time staff, forty graduate and undergraduate tutors, and a stable budget.  In 2005, the Writing Center became the “home” for Temple’s upper-division writing-intensive course program, a major change in mission that brought with it many new responsibilities and exciting opportunities for working on curriculum and faculty development. 

Lori did her masters & doctorate in dance history, and taught dance at SUNY-Fredonia before coming to Temple.  She wrote her dissertation about Orientalist dances in turn-of-the-century American theater, a fun, but, as it turns out, not a sustained passion.  It was her experiences as a graduate tutor that convinced her to change course toward writing center studies.  She has a piece about managerialism in writing centers forthcoming in Before and After the Tutorial: Writing Centers and Institutional Relationships, and she is currently completing a two-year, collaborative, qualitative study of tutors in a tutor development program.  Her work has been presented at CCCC, IWCA, WPA, MAWCA and the Sydney conference on the New Rhetoric. She served as the book reviews editor for the Journal of Writing Program Administration, and she was the host for the 2008 MAWCA conference. Lori serves as vice-president of the Mid-Atlantic Writing Center Association.

Lori is the mother of twin ‘tween girls, Leila and Hana.  She’s a bit of a foodie, and a total wino.  She reads graphic novels, Twitter, and a lot of fiction.  Until recently, she hardly cared at all about shoes, but that changed with the launch of zappos.com.

Harry Denny

Harry Denny is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing Centers in the Institute for Writing Studies at St. John’s University. Prior to joining the English faculty at St. John’s, Denny administered the Writing Center and taught in the Program for Writing & Rhetoric at Stony Brook University (SUNY), and he served as the Associate Director of the Writing Center at Long Island University.

Harry’s primary work focuses on composition studies, writing center theory and practice, cultural studies and research methods.  He currently has a book, Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-one Conferences, under review with Utah State University Press and is developing another manuscript with Michele Eodice on research methods for writing centers. His research has focused on the rhetoric of social movements and identity politics, with a specific focus on those issues in relation to writing centers, particularly as sites for community-building and for cross-cultural/disciplinary dialog.  Harry has published on media, governmental, legal and activist responses to HIV and civil rights, and has produced work about identity politics in writing centers as well as the problematics of writing assessment protocol.

He is also involved with international, regional, and local writing center professional and community organizations.  Harry is currently the Treasurer and executive board member of the International Writing Centers Association, a former steering committee member of (and past Chair, Vice Chair, and Treasurer ) the Northeast Writing Centers Association, and a planning committee member for Metro-New York City Writing Center Professionals, a local collective.

Harry is serving as an outside reader on doctoral committees for students at Stony Brook University and has reviewed essays and manuscripts for the Writing Center Journal, Journal of Teaching Writing, Signs, and Utah State University Press.

Michele Eodice

Michele Eodice started working in as a peer writing consultant while studying to become a high school English teacher. Her mentor was Thomas Reigstad, co-author of Training Tutors for Writing Conferences. After earning a master’s degree, she pursued a doctorate at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she worked with the other half of the co-authoring team of that book, Donald McAndrew.

After working as the founding director of the writing center at the University of Kansas, Michele moved on to revitalize the writing center at the University of Oklahoma. The scope of her work there includes the writing center, writing across the curriculum, writing fellows, and faculty development. She recently developed the first course for peer writing consultants at OU, Working with Writers, and brings her daily work to her research and writing, most recently through publication of a co-authored book, The Everyday Writing Center.

Currently Michele serves as the president of the International Writing Centers Association and has a strong interest in mentoring and professional development of future writing center directors. To this end, she is returning to the Summer Institute for the fourth time as a leader and looks forward to meeting the class of 2009.

Katrin Girgensohn

Katrin Girgensohn has worked with the idea of writing as a collaborative art form for 18 years. During her studies in German Literature, Katrin began to teach writing and developed concepts for writing group work. After receiving her MA, she worked as a freelance writing teacher for several years, leading workshops on academic writing at different German universities. For her PhD she developed a seminar on autonomous writing group work at universities and conducted a study on this. Her research papers examine writing center work and student writing. As a Board member of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW) from 2003 to 2005, she helped to build a European Community for Writers. Currently she is a Board member of the European Writing Centers Association. In 2007 she founded the writing center at European Univerity Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder)/Germany, close to the Polish border. Her writing center offers peer tutoring for students, a program for PhD students, writing tandems for international students, and writing groups. In 2008 the writing center hosted the first peer tutor conference in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Additionally, Katrin works with creative writing groups and regularly leads tourists on writing excursions through her hometown of Berlin. On stage she performed women’s literature shows, and in “Theodoras Literatursalon” she invited members of Berlin’s literary scene to present their texts. Katrin is the mother of two daughters who – in spite of being nurtured with a big daily dose of words since breast-feeding days – still like writing.

Karen Keaton Jackson

Karen Keaton Jackson is an assistant professor of English at North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina, where she teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate composition courses and directs the Writing Studio. She received her B.S. in English Secondary Education from Hampton University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric from Wayne State University. Her research interests include literacy, race, and identity, and how they intertwine in the urban writing classroom. As a graduate student, she taught courses in African-American literature, multicultural literacy, and helped to develop a community based service-learning course. She had not really planned on directing a writing center when she took her current job. However, once she became its director, she never looked back! Since then, she changed the name of the writing center to the Writing Studio and changed the entire vibe and visibility of the space. The tutors became known as consultants and we went from a tiny space with the door most often closed to that still tiny space, but with bright colors, laughter and fun, and an open door that welcomes students. She also became the director of the university’s new writing intensive program and began teaching the composition theory and pedagogy course that all new consultants take their first semester in the Studio.

Karen recently co-edited a collection entitled Closing the Gap: English Educators Address the Tensions Between Teacher Preparation and Teaching Writing in Secondary Schools. Other publications include “The Compositionist as ‘Other’: A Critical Self-Reflection of an Instructor of Color in an Urban Service-Learning Classroom” in the edited collection Social Change in Diverse Teaching Contexts: Touchy Subjects and Routine Practices. From 2007-2008 she served on the executive board of the International Writing Center Association. She currently is on the executive board for the Southeastern Writing Center Association. Karen is excited to serve as a leader this year and even more, she is looking forward to learning strategies and tips she can take back to her own institution. When she is not working, Karen loves spending time with the two men in her life – her husband and her one-year-old son!

Dawn Mendoza

I work at a small, private 2-year college in the suburbs of Boston called Dean College.  In this job I wear three hats: English professor, writing center director and WAC coordinator.  It sounds like a lot until I also add that we have only about 1000 students, and then all those titles shrink down down to a more reasonable size!  I've been tutoring writing and directing writing centers since 2001, mostly working with undergraduate peer tutors.  In my previous job, I concentrated in particular on learning how to tutor non-native English speakers, and in my current job, I've been learning much more about working with developmental writers.

At home in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, I have two boys (David, 5, and Evan, 2), and a house built just before the Civil War that is in desperate need of a paint job and a winning lottery ticket to invest in the gardening.  The fact that my husband is a carpenter seems to mean that I have a ceiling that needs patching, a bookshelf that needs building, and a front porch that needs a board or two replaced.  In my spare time, I fantasize about reading the New York Times on Sunday morning again (instead of making grocery lists while Thomas the Tank Engine plays in the background).

Catherine Oriani

Twenty-five years ago Catherine Oriani was fortunate enough to begin her writing center career under the direction of Stephen North (a.k.a. one of the “Grandfathers” of Writing Centers). Since then she has initiated and directed three high school writing centers at three very different institutions. She has served the Northeastern Writing Center Association as a board member and as president. Additionally, she was NEWCA’s regional representative to the International Writing Center Association, formally known as the National Writing Center Association. Catherine has presented workshops on writing center pedagogy and practice at local, regional and national conferences including the Long Island Language Arts Council, Northeastern Writing Center’s Association, and National Council of Teachers of English. Currently, Catherine teaches English at Garden City High School on Long Island. Ever since being inspired by her brother Ron (who discussed a college paper with her for an hour and a half) almost thirty years ago, Catherine has been and continues to be devoted to talking about writing.

Carol Severino

Carol Severino fell into Writing Center work by accident when in 1989, she answered an ad for a “Director for a Program for the Underprepared Students” at the University of Iowa. She figured she would be good for this job because she had been teaching composition in such a program at the University of Illinois at Chicago for more than 10 years. When she inquired about the program though, she was surprised to find out it was the Writing Center, which for years had mainly served underprepared students who worked on their writing twice a week with the same tutor all semester. She took the job but gradually helped transform the Writing Center from a Program for the Underprepared to what could be called a Program for Every Writer. Now the Iowa Writing Center has as-needed appointments, satellite sites including a community writing center, online tutoring, a Writing Fellows Program, fiction and non-fiction workshops, and a wonderful assistant director, Matt Gilchrist. We still have tutoring twice-a-week with the same tutor, which now appeals to students with many writing demands, especially first-years (both prepared and underprepared), graduate students, and second language writers. We hope to retain most of these programs despite the looming budget cuts.

As Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Director of the Writing Center and Writing Fellows Program, Carol teaches both tutor training courses--the graduate course for new Writing Center tutors, and with her fantastic Assistant Writing Fellows Director Megan Knight, the undergraduate course for new Fellows. She also teaches for the FLARE (Foreign Language Acquisition Research and Education) Ph.D. program and undergraduate courses in travel writing. She writes and publishes about cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary issues in writing pedagogy and writing center work and about her own travel experiences. She has served on the editorial boards of College Composition and Communication, The Journal of Second Language Writing, Writing Center Journal, and Learning Assistance Review. Her other interests include learning more Spanish and Quichua, motivated by her Fulbright in Ecuador last year, keeping up with her twin sons, playing the drums in a rock band and in community drum circles, and hiking and swimming with her black lab. She is looking forward to sharing her writing center experiences with and learning from the Summer Institute participants.