Shannon Carter

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Shannon Carter, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Commerce, has published on various aspects of text-use and production among local publics--from inmates (Community Literacy Journal, 2008) to evangelicals (College English, 2007), from campus administrators (College Composition and Communication, 2009) to at-risk writers (Journal of Basic Writing, 2006). Her first book, The Way Literacy Lives (State University of New York Press, 2008), brings these themes together to argue for more systematic attention to literacy experiences beyond the university. In 2007, based on this approach and attention to new media's role in our increasingly complex literate lives, Carter began working with colleages to establish the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC), a research center designed to study the literate lives of local citizens and students (see Kairos, Fall 2009, and Computers and Composition Online, forthcoming). She is currently at work on a book-length project about citizen discourse enacting change at local levels in the decades immediately following racial integration in southern university towns like the one hosting the March 2011 conference. Fall 2010 A&M-C granted Carter leave to pursue this project, which is tentatively entitled "Writing for a Change: Race, Activism, and Local Politics in a Southern, Rural University Town."

Deborah Mutnick

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Deborah Mutnick, Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Long Island University-Brooklyn, has faciliated university-community projects in neighborhoods and public schools to foster intercultural understanding, recover popular histories, and give voice to individuals and groups whose stories have previously been excluded from the public record. Her book Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education (1996) focuses on underprepared colelge students whose stories are typically told by others rather than by themselves. She has published articles on basic writing and place-based composition studies in the Journal of Basic Writing, Rhetoric Review, and College Composition and Communication. In recognition of the crucial role of new media and the digital humanities, Mutnick is spearheading the construction at the Brooklyn campus of Writers Wing, a suite of technologically smart seminar and conference rooms inspired by Rutgers University-New Brunswick's Writers House, to enable faculty, students, and community members to participate in the new literacies and the increasingly complex mission of the humanities in the 21st century. She is currently working on a manuscript about place-based composition studies titled Writing, Memory, and the Politics of Place (under contract with Utah State UP) and a composition textbook inspired by the Federal Writers's Project and tentatively titled Toward a New American Guide: Writing to Define Who We Are (under contract with Pearson Longman).

Susan Stewart

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Susan Stewart's (Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Commerce) area of specialization is grounded in English Studies, which includes literary theory, pedagogy, and composition studies. The bulk of her work has been focused on the role of race, ethnicity, gender, and religion in young adult literature. Narrative theory, which is based in part on the nature of rhetoric, cultural studies, and critical race theory, serve as her theretical foundations. Through her articles and conference presentations, she has examined invisibility as experienced by African American young adults, the role of white priviledge, the rhetoric and ideology embedded in relgious discourse in young adult literature, and the way in which some American authors characterize and represent adolescents and young adults from other countries. Her work on above has appeared in prestigous journals like The Lion and the Unicorn and Childrens Literature in Education.

EGAD (English Graduates for Academic Development)

The English Graduates for Academic Development (EGAD) serves a variety of functions at Texas A & M University-Commerce. EGAD hosts an annual conference that invites students, undergraduate and graduate, and faculty to come together and discuss current and future issues in literature and composition and encourages presentations analyzing texts, games, visual rhetoric, graphic novels, comic books, and more. The conference has included presenters from Texas Women’s University, University of Texas-Dallas, University of North Texas, University of California-Santa Cruz, Cal State-Fullerton, St. Louis University, and others. Such a diverse gathering of professionals and students provides our graduate students the opportunity to engage in the same intellectual activities that would be expected of them in their future academic careers. This conference also offers EGAD student organizers the opportunity to plan and execute a professional conference. Ultimately, EGAD affords our graduate students a place to learn and hone the skills necessary to succeed in their professions.