Writers @ Work
5th Annual Composition Conference
for Student Writers

Friday, April 3rd McFarland Student Union Building 

CLICK HERE FOR CONFERENCE PROGRAM

This year’s Composition Conference for Student Writers is unique in its five-year history.  The past four conferences were limited to first-year students from our Intro to College Composition, College Composition, and Honors Composition courses.  This year we’ve opened up the conference to student 

in all of our composition courses.  While the majority of the panels will still draw from first-year courses, this year we expect student papers from our Advanced Composition classes, Rhetoric of Literature, Teaching of Writing, and other courses to take part.

This year’s conference will be an all-day event concerned with the work of writing, writers’ work, and writing work.  The day will be broken up into four or five sessions comprised of three or four panels each.  Each session is one hour and fifteen minutes long. For panels of three students, each student will have approximately 20 minutes to present a paper. The remaining time will be reserved for questions from the audience. A panel may be larger than three students, but the total length of time of each panel will remain at one hour with 15 minutes for questions.

Keynote speaker:

This year’s Keynote speaker will be literacy scholar, publisher, and educational activist Dr. Steve Parks.  He is an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University, Executive Director of New City Community Press, and the Director of Teachers for a Democratic Culture.

Dr. Parks works examines “how composition has attempted to align itself with progressive movements for social and political change.”  He believes that it is absolutely necessary for “academics to support the literacy and political rights of both students and local communities.”

Dr. Steve Parks
“Once I was a Washing Machine:
Worker/Writer Alliances at the Edge
of the Economic Abyss”

Conference Archives

2008 Composition Conference