Michelle Chen

@michellechn.bsky.social

7275 Followers 1098 Following

Senior Editor at the Univ Press of Colorado (Utah State UP & U of Alaska Press) acquiring books in composition & rhetoric, folklore, & polar studies. Formerly at OUP (music), Palgrave (politics) & Bloomsbury (33 1/3). Based in Brooklyn. Opinions my own.

Dear NCTE Executive Committee, I was alarmed to hear that NCTE is considering dissolving CCCC, a vital organization that has addressed the specific needs of writing studies scholars for over seven decades. Disbanding Cs would undo years of hard work building up this robust network of researchers, teachers, students, and publishers. I sincerely hope that you will vote against this decision.  I write in my capacity as a NCTE member and publisher for whom Cs is my major annual conference. My press (Utah State University Press) exhibits every year. I do the bulk of my commissioning—meeting with researchers to discuss new ideas for books—in person at Cs. Acquisitions editors often like to joke that we do more acquisitions work at a single conference than we do the rest of the year combined, but there is some truth to that. For acquisitions editors, scholarly society conferences are absolutely integral to connecting with new audiences and authors. Conferences provide a space for scholars to try out new ideas and approaches with their peers, which editors then explore as potential book projects. Losing this centralized space where publishers and writing studies scholars meet to brainstorm future books will have consequences for the research output of the field (which, we know, also affects scholars’ academic job security).  For many Cs attendees, the yearly exhibit hall is also the place they discover newly published titles. This benefits both publishers, who want to see their books have an impact, and authors, who have all the titles they should be aware of at their fingertips. The exhibit hall at Cs is always a vibrant exchange of ideas, as scholars and students discover exciting new writing and are (often) inspired to write books themselves. It’s a place to pick up a copy of your mentor’s book, flip through a CCCC award-winning title, or explore interesting research that may be tangential to your field of study, but spark new ideas. As university library monograph bu…
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Cover of the book The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde.
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Book cover for "Our Charge To Keep" with the quoted text: “Too often we judge the language practices of African Americans against the backdrop of systems that were not meant for them, not created by or for them, and, in fact, were established for the express purpose of excluding them! Let us not try to recreate our students in the image of the ‘masters’—those scholars whose ideologies and use of language have traditionally been esteemed by Western culture, nor assume students’ weaknesses can only be strengthened by traditional mechanisms.“ —Kem Roper, “What Are We Here For?: Antiracist Pedagogy in HBCU Writing Centers“
Book cover for The Pipeline is Broken: Graduate Students of Color on Racism, Justice, and Joy in the Academy edited by Orly Clerge, Asia Ivey, Michelle Harris, and Sherrill Sellers
Roundtable information for the session at the CCCC conference titled "Editing and Publishing in Writing Studies: Practical and Ethical Considerations in Scholarly Reviewing Practices"
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