What does it mean to “write the race” in America? Kimberly A. Bain reviews Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Black Box, tracing how language shapes—and constrains—Black identity. A sharp read with big stakes for our classrooms.

Full review: bit.ly/review-black...

What if our conferences actually matched our values?

In their new Composition Studies article, Kofi J. Adisa and Frankie Condon imagine a future for academic gatherings that’s more accessible, inclusive, and human. 🧵

🔗 Read here: bit.ly/www-future

If we want equitable writing classrooms, we must rethink how and why we regulate behavior — not just what we grade.

🔗 Read Gomes’s full piece: bit.ly/CS53-1
💬 What expectations—spoken or unspoken—shape how students show up in your classroom?

What are we really grading — writing or behavior?
In Composition Studies 53.1, @mattgomes.bsky.social explores how grading contracts don’t just assess writing, but regulate how students act, participate, and even think about writing.

🔗 Read here: bit.ly/CS53-1

New on the FEN blog: Joyce Kinkead’s collaboration with student researchers explores pens, pencils, and even quills in the classroom.

🔗 bit.ly/Zen-Pen-Blog

Teaching first-year writing in 2025 means juggling more than thesis statements. Students are navigating stress spirals, fragmented reading habits, and pandemic aftershocks.

Casie Fedukovich & Brooke Mulhollem offer a reset: the ACT model.

🔗 Read more: bit.ly/ACT-FYW

How can we rethink academic conferences in a world of growing precarity?

In Composition Studies 53.1, Genie Nicole Giaimo reflects on the inequities of academic labor—and the possibilities for reimagining how we gather.

Grades often stifle students’ willingness to take risks. But what if grading itself could invite risk?

In Composition Studies 53.1, @dlib24.bsky.social explores how labor-based grading contracts (LBGCs) reshape what risk means in the classroom. 🧵

What if the future of conferences looked nothing like the past?
Our first highlight from 53.1’s “Where We Are” is Cristy Beemer & Rebecca S. Richards’ “Nimble and Sustainable.” 🧵

Want to shape the next Composition Studies special issue?
We’re looking for guest editors for Summer 2026.

(Open-access + digital → wide circulation + real impact)

Reflection isn’t just a tidy essay at the end of class. ✨

In the newest issue of Composition Studies, Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday shows how reflection is alive, happening in motion through everyday classroom moments.

👇 3 reasons her new book is worth your time:

Crum blends the cyanotype’s 1840s roots in science with her own observations about attention in teaching and learning.

#cs531 #chartingourcourse #compositionstudies #writingstudies #rhetcomp #coverart #cyanotype

The cover of our new issue features Attention by Susanna Crum—a cyanotype that reimagines the “blueprint” as the architecture of thought.

#cs531 #chartingourcourse #compositionstudies #writingstudies #rhetcomp #coverart #cyanotype

Composition Studies readers and #4C25 goers, it's time for a subscription discount. Use the QR code below to take $10 off any one-year subscription to our journal. And, if you find Jacob or Zach at 4Cs, show them your confirmation for a free sticker!

“But most of all, every student leaves the course knowing that editing and publishing is not just ‘correcting’ or ‘copy editing’ other people’s words” (Richards 142).

Read more from @RhetorRichards: bit.ly/4a9Ay3P. 🎉
#editing #publishing #antiracism #feminism #rhetcomp #contractgrading #umass #engl

Happy New Year!