THE WRITER'S INSIDER
Vol. 1, Issue 2
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Winter 2015
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CANDIDATES FOR TECHNICAL AND PROFESSIONAL WRITING POSITION COMING TO WRITING ARTS DEPARTMENT
Do you want to use your voice to make a difference and to establish yourself in the Writing Arts community? This is your opportunity!
Rowan University is looking to hire an assistant professor within the Writing Arts department to teach technical and professional writing, with grounding in composition and rhetoric. As part of the decision process, three candidates for the position are coming to Rowan to engage with faculty and students. Through this process, candidates benefit by gaining a greater sense for what work the Writing Arts department does as a community.
This is an excellent opportunity for students to engage in direct, open conversation with Writing Arts professionals and present the perspective of what the Writing Arts program has done on individual and community levels.
"So... How can I get involved?"
There are many different opportunities to become involved with meeting the candidates. Each candidate leads three sessions: a research presentation, a meeting with students, and a teaching presentation. Below are the dates for each candidate's set of sessions.
Monday, December 7
Wednesday, December 9
Friday, December 11
This is an excellent opportunity for students to engage in direct, open conversation with Writing Arts professionals and present the perspective of what the Writing Arts program has done on individual and community levels.
"So... How can I get involved?"
There are many different opportunities to become involved with meeting the candidates. Each candidate leads three sessions: a research presentation, a meeting with students, and a teaching presentation. Below are the dates for each candidate's set of sessions.
Monday, December 7
- Research Presentation: 9:30 – 10:30, Bozorth 118
- Meeting with Students: 11:00 – 11:30
- Email [email protected] if interested
- Teaching Presentation: 3:45 – 4:30, Bozorth 129
Wednesday, December 9
- Research Presentation: 2:00 – 3:00, Robinson 310
- Meeting with Students: 4:15 – 4:45
- Email [email protected] if interested
- Teaching Presentation: 5:00 – 5:45, Bozorth 129
Friday, December 11
- Research Presentation: 11:15 – 12:15, Bozorth 114
- Teaching Presentation: 2:00 – 2:45 Bozorth 129
- Meeting with Students: 4:15 – 4:45, Bozorth Conference Room
- Email [email protected] if interested
Students are welcome to attend the research and teaching presentations as well as the student meetings. While it is not required for students to attend all sessions if interested, all students are welcome to attend as many as they would like. A student presence is an important part of the process, not only for candidates to meet some of the students they will be teaching but also for students to gain a greater sense of the direction in which the Writing Arts department is moving. This is a unique professional opportunity for students, undergraduate and graduate alike.
The candidate will teach both undergraduate and graduate programs in technical and professional writing. The candidate will also teach in the first-year writing program, including the interdisciplinary engineering writing program.
LYRICAL ALLIANCE CUPSI QUALIFIERLyrical Alliance welcomes you to our annual CUPSI qualifier to determine who will represent Rowan University at the 2016 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational. This year CUPSI will be held at the University of Texas at Austin from April 6-9.
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Competitive spoken word poetry, or "slam," is an art form originally popularized in 1984 by construction worker Marc Smith. CUPSI follows standard Poetry Slam, Inc. rules, including the 3:10 time limit. Judges are randomly selected out of the audience and score competitors on a 0-10 scale. We will need 5 judges for this slam, so if you want to participate but don't want to compete, you are welcome to come.
Our feature for the night will be Alain Ginsberg! Alain is a writer, performer, Individual World Poetry Slam competitor, and Capturing Fire finalist from Baltimore City, MD. You can see their work here. The writing workshop portion of the night starts at 6:30; it costs $3 to guarantee a spot on either the open mic or the slam list. The writing workshop will be taught by Alain. The open mic portion of the night begins at 7:30. As soon as the open mic is over, the slam will begin. The open mic is open to anyone who wants to share their work, but the slam is open only to those who want to compete to become part of the CUPSI team. There is a limit of 12 people on the slam list. The format for the slam is as follows:
The top five poets in the slam portion are automatically part of the CUPSI team. The last poet standing will win Rowan's grand slam champion award. The coach for the finalized team will be Scott Sigl, who has represented Philadelphia at multiple national slams since 2012, and most recently coached the 2015 Philadelphia Fuze team to the National Poetry Slam. |
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GLASSWORKS LITERARY MAGAZINEGlassworks recently nominated four works for the 2015 Pushcart Prize: "Girl with Cherries (Copley Square)" by Lynn Holmgren; "Threads" by Jeffrey S. Markovitz; "Trapped Bird in Hospital Corridor" by Kate Peterson; and "Camminare a Venezia: A Poemoir" by JC Reilly. All four are currently featured on the homepage.
Fall 2015 Issue 11 is available now. It features poetry by Ceridwen Hall, Rage Hezekiah, Karen Hildebrand, Lynn Holmgren, Jessica Hudgins, James Croal Jackson, Susanna Lang, Yvonne Higgins Leach, Kevin O'Connor, Claudia Putnam, Noel Sloboda, Tina Tocco, Mark Lee Webb, and Susan Whitmore; fiction by Rachel Cochran, Brett Roth, and Alan Wor;creative nonfiction by Kelsey Dean; artwork by Phyllis Gorsen, Dave Magyar, W. Jack Savage, and Fred Siegel; and an interview with Aimee Parkison. |
A CONVERSATION WITH RACHAEL SHAPIRO
Rachael Shapiro teaches Writing, Research, and Technology and Intro to Writing Arts. She works with students to develop their rhetorical flexibility across a range of writing spaces and genres, focusing on questions of social and political relevance. She has taught developmental, freshman, critical research, professional, and digital writing classes both online and face-to-face, in addition to years of writing center work. Her research centers on digital literacies, feminism, and globalization. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition Online, The Basic Writing eJournal, Literacy in Composition Studies, and Reflection. This interview seeks to discuss in further depth her experience at Rowan as a professor. |
Q: Can you tell us about your education history?
A: I did my PhD at Syracuse University; I spent seven years learning a lot. In my undergrad, I was an English and philosophy major. My scholarship is primarily about teaching digital writing, language politics, and digital literacies in the global area. All of those aspects blend together in important ways, and I’m an advocate for transmodality and thinking about the politics of standards in scholarly and academic writing and how we push against and move beyond them for our own purposes. Q: What are some projects you've worked on? A: I was involved with a lot of things. I was with the center for women's concerns and the environmental action committee. I was in the English graduate organization for my master's. When I was in my PhD program, we created something called the CCR Circle. For my dissertation I worked on analyzing the use of twitter in Iranian election program, and a transnational feminist critique of the way that Western people talked about that as a social media revolution. I’m currently working on an article, a collaboration with my friend Missy Watson from Syracuse, an article that takes up questions of translangualism and transmodality, and how those two bodies of scholarship have advocated for a shift in the way we think about standard language and standard composing practices. More specifically we’re going to address how students and faculty members have resisted moving away from those standards, and how we advocate for addressing that kind of resistance and responding to it. Those are a few of my projects that I have at the moment; also, I'm working on just adjusting. Q: What are some other things you work on? What publications do you have? What classes have you taught before? A: My most recent publication is in an online journal called Literacy and Composition Studies. I've previously taught a lot of different kinds of classes. I've taught basic writing, which the equivalent of fundamentals here, and I taught freshman writing classes, sophomore research classes, digital writing classes, and professional writing classes. I like to teach assignments that combine the digital and the physical. For one assigment I did in a research class at Syracuse, students wrote about the way that digital media was working in through and across local campus activism. As part of a reflection, they produced a physical object that made a claim about the trend they were noticing. Q: What are some of your favorite aspects to study and teach, or to build on through projects? A: One would be public writing, for campus communities, or visual writing or visual rhetoric. There’s a lot of room in there for examining how language and image play together. I work that into my classroom in small ways; my assignments are very multi-layered. In Technologies and the Future of Writing, the module in Introduction to Writing Arts, students compose visual maps of their personal digital ecology, so there’s a lot of room for experimentation. The first assignment was a digital literacy narrative in which students explored and told the story of some significant moment in their digital literacy history or development, or sometimes current practice, that helped shape the context in which the technology was being used. They had to ask questions about the context, such as, What was happening historically? How widespread were the trends? How can you fit your narrative into the situation of everyday uses of technology at the time? Then students drafted their narratives and used photoshop to create images to illustrate what happened at various points during their narrative piece and made it into a video. Q: What do you like the most about working here? What do you look forward to seeing happen in the future at Rowan? A: I’m looking forward to all sorts of opportunities to teach genre-specific classes, or maybe one day a global-digital literacies course. What I’ve noticed about Rowan students is that they don’t take things for granted and work very hard. Most students seem to work full or part time jobs in addition to being students, which I think is very admirable and inspiring. I’m excited to be here to witness that, and help serve the educational needs of students here. When I'm here, I hear the voices in the halls and I want to hear students talking about classes they have in common. I want to make the Writing Arts Club even more visible, and I know there’s a lot of effort going into that happening so I’m excited to see that enthusiasm. I think the best thing we can do is promote visibility and advertising, and a bigger social media presence for the department and the club. |
SCIENTIFIC WRITING WORKSHOP
The Rowan University Writing Center hosted its annual Scientific Writing Workshop on November 17. The event was one of many services offered by the Writing Center that aim to give students the ability to work with content-based tutoring styles, an opportunity not afforded often by other Writing Centers around the country.
Christopher Castro, writing center tutor and biology major, shared his expertise with students who have many questions regarding how to write scientific works regarding format, genre adherence, and the nitty gritty nuts and bolts questions that are hard to find on our own. Follow the Writing Center for upcoming events. |
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RHYTHM AND PROSE
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Avant Magazine's e-board and staff performed poetry and prose from their latest publication at Ry's Bagels on November 24th. Featured writers performed their works that can be seen in the 2015 edition of Avant Magazine. Audiences were given opportunities to share their work with their peers; some performed duet poetry wowing the crowd with their spoken word.
For more events and opportunities for publication, contact [email protected]. |
NA.NO.WRI.MO. AT THE W.C.
The Writing Center hosted another annual event and service for Rowan student writers. In celebration of Nation Month on Writing, the Writing Center organized a writing marathon featuring peer tutors who provided feedback on writing and ideas for those participating in NanoWriMo.
The Writing Center gathered several clubs including Avant Magazine, Writing Arts Club and special guest Carly Szabo, Rowan Alumni and editor-in-chief of Trigger Warning, a literary magazine. |
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PUBLICATION INDUSTRY PRESENTATION
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Manuela Soares, Associate Director of Pace University Press and lecturer at Pace, gave a talk to Writing Arts Students concerning publications in 2015. Topics discussed were not limited to careers in the field, internships and related opportunities, programs to help students develop professionally, and possibilities for writers in many genres to be published.
In her over thirty-year career, Soares worked in both magazine and book publishing as a writer and editor, most recently as the Managing Editor at Scholastic, where she oversaw the hardcover (and some paperback) imprints, including the first five Harry Potter books. Prior to that she was a Senior Editor at Rizzoli International, acquiring books in a variety of disciplines (fashion, design, cooking), but focusing mainly on art and photography. More information can be found here |
Stay tuned for more Writing Arts department events in the next edition of the newsletter.