Letter from the Chair
As some of you know, about every seven years, each university department undergoes a formal External Review. Our review process started last year with the preparation of a capacious self-study document. At the beginning of Spring Break, we got back a 20-page report from the external reviewers who’d visited campus in February; it hit my inbox not long after Megan Jewell texted me photos of the first Irish Literature Study Abroad cohort, newly arrived at the Dublin airport and looking happy and excited. So I started the break with a sense of embarking (vicariously) on something consequential, taking next steps enabled by the hard and thoughtful work of my colleagues.
Full disclosure: the External Review Report isn’t all roses, though the reviewers sung the praises of the Writing Program. They described the Writing Resource Center in glowing terms and congratulated the Writing Program faculty on the impressive reach of the Academic Inquiry courses (which teach literally every CWRU freshman) and the high-quality writing pedagogy training they provide to the English Department graduate students. But most of the Report gives me flashbacks to my two years in the Stegner workshop at Stanford. Studying poetry with Eavan Boland and a cohort of scarily talented (and blunt) fellow writers was one of the toughest creative challenges I’ve faced. It took all my nerve (and pre-workshop grilled cheese sandwiches) to keep my resolution to bring in the messy and promising poem drafts that I didn’t know how to fix.
My colleagues here were so brave and so honest about this External Review. English showed up and shared the equivalents of messy, promising poems, often in the form of questions: How do we revamp graduate instruction in the face of fiscal and logistical constraints? How do we make our Colloquium series better fit the needs of the diverse audiences who attend it (or who might one day attend it if we get the programming mix right)? How do we build community across disparate groups of faculty with different foci, job descriptions, and goals?
The External Reviewers shared some of our big concerns. And they pointed out others we’d overlooked. (For example, they asked: How do you make the Capstone paper logistics and requirements clearer for majors and more aligned with your pedagogical goals?) It’s shockingly easy to look at the trees (all those small and large pieces of advice) and lose sight of the forest (the success of the undergraduate curriculum and the overwhelming happiness reported by our English majors and minors).
So I’m leaning into something told to new Stegners on the first day of workshop at Stanford: your job is to pretend that the thing you hate is the most important thing in your colleague’s poem…then tell that person what else has to change in the draft in order to make the hated thing work. It’s a simple-sounding thought experiment that’s helpfully hard to do! I suspect it will help me discern a path forward and get ready to facilitate a department-wide conversation about what we think of the messy trove of feedback we just got, and how we plan to respond.
I took the photo at the top of this note right before Spring Break, at the insistence of some current and former English majors. Carlos, Chloe, and Tychicus were sitting at the conference table in my office, taking a rare break from classes, studying, and meetings. They were assembling friendship bracelets to give away at our upcoming Taylor Swift-inspired poetry writing workshop. Call it a grace note: the undergrads decided that our one-day takeover of Colloquium wouldn’t be complete without a post-workshop friendship bracelet making afterparty. So they were laughing and joking and getting ready, stringing seed beads and song lyrics (letter by letter) onto clear elastic thread. And they asked me to document the moment.
We’re going to be so busy for the rest of the academic year . . . but I’m going to keep doing the poetry thought experiment to navigate a path through it. And, thanks to some very wise undergrads, I’m also going to assemble some bracelets, and enjoy the small, daily magic of this place.
All best,
Chi
Reimagining the Writing Classroom
Ada Hubrig Delivers the Sadar Lecture
At the start of every semester, there is a predictable routine. We scramble to put the finishing touches on our course syllabi, start planning our first lessons, and check our class rosters on SIS to see the names and faces of the students we are soon to meet. Sometime during the new semester chaos, an email arrives in our inbox from the Office of Disability Services. In it, we see the familiar language describing the accommodations that such-and-such student will need. For some of us, the required adjustments are easy to make but, sometimes, the path forward is not clear. The generic list of accommodations can make it difficult to know what exactly our students need from us. What’s more, the notification tells us very little about the lived experiences of our students, how their disabilities have shaped their educational journeys, and how well we will be able to meet their needs.
Dr. Ada Hubrig, the 2025 Edward and Melinda S. Sadar Lecturer in Writing in the Disciplines, understands the challenges facing both students and faculty navigating the landscape of disability in higher education. Hubrig is a prominent disability scholar, educator, and advocate who has published widely on topics related to disability justice, accessibility, and pedagogy. They are currently an Assistant Professor and Director of Composition in the English Department at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas; their bio also proudly identifies them as an “autistic, genderqueer femme, multiply-disabled caretaker of cats.” It is through this embodied perspective that Hubrig frames their scholarship as a call-to-action to reimagine the writing classroom proactively, as a central part of our course design, long before those accommodation emails trickle in.
In their Sadar lecture on December 8, titled “Collective Access and Disability Literacy as Cultural Rhetorics,” Hubrig reminds us that the responsibility for building collective access to education cannot be limited to administrative solutions, no matter how well intended. Hubrig argues that much of our current university practices regarding accommodation are embedded in old ideas about access that are rooted in the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, which focused on preventing discrimination but did not alter fundamentally the ableist structures that require accommodation in the first place.
Administration approaches to access often focus too narrowly on retrofitting existing practices and systems to make room for the disabled. Hubrig points out that technology has only increased this tendency to ask disabled individuals to “catch up” with their non-disabled peers; while screen readers or AI may be useful for some, these are also just new examples of what Hubrig calls “disability dongles.” Our reliance on technology can allow us to sidestep more difficult conversations about outdated systems that reflect an unintentional ableism in higher education.
Instead, Hubrig’s lecture implored us to “reconceptualize access” by speaking with (not for) disabled people to create access that is relational, expansive, and adaptable. We must acknowledge that disability can often be at odds with institutional values, such as efficiency, but universities can work with disabled communities to seek out greater accessibility. As Hubrig notes, it is possible to find “both/and” solutions – following the principles of Universal Design – that work for students, faculty, and the university. Furthermore, when administrators or faculty inevitably stumble in our efforts to fund such solutions, we should embrace community feedback as an opportunity to learn and evolve.
But evolution is not limited to institutions; rather, Hubrig’s work also helps each of us to reflect on our own pedagogy. This past fall, we had the opportunity to do just that in our Writing Faculty Working Group on Disability Literacy. Over the course of the semester, we engaged with Hubrig’s scholarship to explore how we might improve access in our syllabi and classrooms, and how to identify and address ableist assumptions about labor and time in our writing assignments.
For Hubrig, such universal respect for student autonomy begins with using disability frameworks to design assignments that can benefit all students. In their workshop on campus, “Alt Text: Multimodal Rhetorics Remix,” Hubrig walked faculty through a lesson plan designing alt text for images. Rather than treating alt text as a courtesy to those using screen readers, Hubrig highlighted how such exercises speak directly to our goals of teaching students about audience and rhetorical context.
As a working group, we found ourselves both challenged and reaffirmed by their work, especially as it intersects with the particularities of our institution, our program, and our students here at CWRU. Hubrig’s work on “resilient design” was a critical reminder that creating inclusive spaces in the writing classroom starts with the structure of our syllabi and the schedules we set. They have encouraged us to acknowledge different concepts of time and labor in our teaching and bolstered our belief that accommodation is a value that benefits all students, beyond and outside of diagnostic criteria and institutional policy. What’s more, we felt inspired by Hubrig’s emphasis on the larger, and arguably more important, work of building communities of care that ask us to approach the teaching of writing with empathy and openness.
—Vicki Daniel, Denna Iammarino, Kristine Kelly, and Annie Pecastaings
New Gutenberg Annex Fall Updates
The New Gutenberg Annex has been busy five or six days a week this spring, supporting an array of student projects in its spaces.
– After a semester of preparations in Fall 2025, the 4-credit hour course, How to Do Things with Books, has proved very attractive in Spring 2026. Fully enrolled, it had a deep waitlist and will be offered again in Fall 2026. The course, co-taught by Profs Kurt Koenigsberger (English) and Barbara Mann (Hoffman Professor of Modern Hebrew) and crosslisted among English, Art Studio, Jewish Studies, and World Literature, has drawn students from an eclectic range of majors. The students work together in a seminar and workshop on Monday and Wednesday afternoons in Guilford before moving to Bellflower Hall for lab sessions. Lab sessions have been enriched by the guidance of Annex volunteer George Barnum, who brings expertise from his time as Government Documents Librarian at KSL and in the Government Publishing Office in Washington, D.C.
– In the weeks running up to spring break, students have dissected book specimens; bound pamphlets and slipcases/phase boxes to contain them; made decorative papers to cover codices they have folded, sewn, and cased in; forged digital typefaces; and begun to integrate graphic material of their own device (linocut and drypoint prints) with innovative settings of type. In the second half of the semester, they will make ink and watermarked paper, explore foundational practices of analytic bibliography, and bring their accumulated skills to bear on variously conceived “altered books.”
– Eight senior Mechanical Engineering majors are completing senior projects in Annex spaces across four teams. Students are working to fabricate type using 3D printed and laser-cut materials, design systems for replicating sixteenth-century movable musical type (after Pierre Attaingnant) (Prof. David Rothenberg [Music] is a consultant on this project), and refine CAD drawings for future fabrication of a wooden common press, modeled on the Smithsonian’s Franklin Press. One of these students, Christian Palios, has also been crucial to sorting collections of Greek type.
– Three CWRU interns have helped the Annex organize its growing collections of metal and wood type, adjust and repair some of our dozen presses, and optimize student and faculty experiences in the Annex’s spaces. Paige Erickson (senior; Art History and Art Studio), Jack Rudofsky (junior; Civil Engineering), and Nerya Freidenreich (first-year; Chemistry) have brought expertise in foreign languages (including Cyrillic and Hebrew), technical skills, and familiarity both with studio and bibliographic practices. Their excellent work has made the Annex better for everyone!
– Two Cuyahoga Community College students – Joi Scruggs and Malcolm Schmitz – are completing microinternships in the Annex with the support of the Cleveland Humanities Collaborative.
– Since 2012, students in Kurt Koenigsberger’s English 302 course have prepared commonplace books, and since 2018 they have bound them in the Annex using commercial kits. In spring 2026 for the first time students used materials decorated and prepared in the Annex with newly made equipment and tools, in addition to those purchased with the 2025-26 Nord Grant.
– The Annex is grateful for the support of the Nord Grant from UCITE; an Eirik Borve Fund grant; provisions from research and startup funds; formal donations; and gifts in kind!
—Kurt Koenigsberger
NCTE Conference on Communication & Composition 2026
During the first week of March, CWRU’s Writing Program served as local hosts for the annual NCTE Conference on Communication & Composition in Cleveland, Ohio. This national conference sees thousands of writing instructors, rhetoricians, and program administrators gather together for four days of presentation, workshops, and networking events. Writing Program Director and Oviatt Professor of English, Dr. Kimberly Emmons welcomed conference attendees to the city at the opening ceremony, while Hospitality Chairs, Dr. Erika Olbricht and Dr. Martha Schaffer, provided recommendations for local restaurants and sites to see, and Volunteer Chairs, Dr. Thom Dawkins and Dr. Shayna Sharpe coordinated more than 40 volunteers from across the university and from neighboring institutions to assist with the conference on the ground. Many thanks to:
Denna Iammarino
Kris Kelly
Michelle Lyons-McFarland
Heidi Moawad
Reda Mohammed
Annie Pécastaings
Campbell Pratt
Xixin Qiu
Amy Sattler
Jess Slentz
Pouya Vakili
Marion Wolfe
Xia Wu
In the flurry of pre-conference events and workshops, Peer Writing Fellows (Undergraduate WRC consultants) Justine Allen, Annabel Degenholtz, James Gomez Faulk, Lucian Alexander-Roy, Sarah Secrest, and Pehel Pehel, presented at the International Writing Center Conference on “Community Outreach and Writing Center Programming in an Age of Disconnection,” explaining their projects designed to connect the WRC to students’ lives through activities and events that promote community and human interaction. The Fellows described their PAWS (Peer-Assisted Writing Support) evenings, social events like cookie decorating and zine-making, and a series of classroom introductions and workshops about the WRC. Bookending the conference and this topic, Peer Writing Fellows, Justine Allen and Annabel Degenholtz, facilitated a zine-making table in the conference’s Action Hub.
Several Writing Program faculty presented projects related to their teaching and research. Dr. Cara Byrne, Dr. Michelle Lyons-McFarland, Dr. Denna Iammarino, and Dr. Kris Kelly hosted a well-attended roundtable discussion titled, “Make That Table Round: Multimodal Making and Inclusive Pedagogy in First-Year Writing,” in which they described their applications of critical making theory and making pedagogy in their writing-intensive courses. Using these concepts, they have been able to enhance their students’ writing experiences in skills by emphasizing the iterative process of composing as well as human-oriented and physical manifestations of thought and revision. Merging theory and practice, these instructors shared their class projects: an artist’s book, a zine, remixes for elementary students and their teachers, and a multimodal project designed to promote students’ individual voices.
Writing Resource Center (WRC) Director, Dr. Gabrielle Parkin, and Assistant Director, Dr. Marion Wolfe, also presented to a full room of attendees on “Rethinking Required Writing Center Visits to Build Community Through Collaboration.” They described a project conducted between the WRC and AIQS 110: Foundations of College Writing, in which students were required to attend two WRC sessions with their AIQS papers at different times in the semester. Preliminary data from a survey of students, faculty, and consultants revealed positive results of this emphasis on writing as social activity and the need for human readers and feedback. The WRC will continue to develop and promote this work, which creates a strong partnership between different elements of the WRC and the Writing Program.
–Martha Schaffer
Department News
Ageh Bedell and Amber Kidd published a chapter within this title: Applied Humanities and the Active Life of Literature edited by Virginia Ramos.
Caren Beilin‘s novel Sea, Poison was longlisted for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award.
Michele Berger took part in a Speculative Fiction Panel on Saturday, January 24th.
CWRU off-site readings at AWP on March 5th: Lindsay Turner, Abigail Raley, Rohan Chhetri, Caren Beilin.
Joe DeLong and Arianna Simon are featured in The Daily discussing their hobbies during National Hobby Month.
Gusztav Demeter presented on “Using the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework and Backward Design to develop a genre-based Writing Across Disciplines course for second language writers” at the 21st Symposium on Second Language Writing in Taipei in October 2025.
Adrianna Deptula has received the 2026 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication for “Charting Chronicity: A Thematic Analysis of Clinical Pain Assessment Tools and Patient Documentation Design.” Deptula received a PhD from Purdue University in 2025.
Walt Hunter discusses the classroom in The Atlantic.
Denna Iammarino had an article come out in the Sixteenth Century Journal.
Alexandra Magearu’s essay, “Against Innocence: Unravelling the Myth of the Depoliticized Child,” is out now in Public Seminar.
William Marling has published “Charles Bukowski and European Art” in the French journal Leaves (Universite de Bordeaux).
Ben Mauk‘s 2024 New York Times Magazine story “The Long Road from Xinjiang” is one of three English-language finalists for the True Story Award, a global journalism prize. The nominees, chosen from 959 submissions in 102 countries, will be invited to the True Story Festival in Bern from June 5-7, 2026.
Marilyn Mobley, standing to be recognized for her scholarship and for being a founding member of the Toni Morrison Society at the Ohio statehouse on what would have been Toni Morrison’s 95th birthday on Wednesday, February 18, 2026.
Todd Oakley published the following article: “Scalar Reasoning in Macroeconomics: The rhetorical oddities of even.” Cognitive Semantics (2025) 11.1, 1-37.
Xixin Qiu received an Accelerator Award Seed Grant from the Center for Social Data Analytics at Penn State University for $1,000 for his collaborative work titled “Evolving voices of care: Tracing information and emotion trajectories across dementia stages in online caregiver communities.”
Stephanie Redekop presented on providing co-curricular care for graduate grant writers as part of a roundtable discussion titled “Care Practices in Graduate Writing Centers” at the 2026 Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Toronto.
Robin Beth Schaer‘s poem “The Long Now” appears on the Slowdown podcast.
Three of Lindsay Turner‘s poems appeared in the holiday issue of The New York Review of Books.
Thrity Umrigar has been designated a LibraryReads Hall of Fame Author! “The LibraryReads Hall of Fame honors authors who have had multiple titles appear on the monthly list since 2013.” Missing Sam marks Thrity’s third LibraryReads pick title after The Museum of Failures and The Story Hour. Check out the list at LibraryReads.org.
Here is Xia Wu‘s documentary that she produced as part of her Freedman Faculty Fellowship–“Strangers on Strange Land: Who Are Chinese International Students.”
Rohan Chhetri Poetry Reading
Alumni News
Ali Black is a 2026 NAACP Image Award Nominee! Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry for We Look Better Alive (Burnside Review Press, 2025).
Miriam Goldman (’10) has accepted a position with Medtronic Minimed as Senior Director of Regulatory Affairs Transformation and Strategy.
Alum (’98) Marie Vibbert‘s next book is coming out in April from Apex Books, a small but well-known publisher. Multitude was her MFA thesis (Ashland University 2025) and follows a hive-mind intelligence as it tries to make sense of humanity.
Send Me Your News
If you have news you would like to share in a future newsletter, please send it to managing editor Susan Grimm (sxd290@case.edu). If you wish to be added to our mailing list, just let us know. The department also has a Facebook page on which six hundred of your classmates and profs are already sharing their news. Become a member of the community and post your own news. We want to know. The department will be posting here regularly too—news of colloquiums, readings, etc. We tweet @CWRUEnglish. We are cwruenglish on Instagram.