Teachers on the Edge ─ The WOE Interviews, 1989-2017

Teachers on the Edge: the WOE Interviews collects 27 years worth of interviews, including many key figures in modern Writing Studies, a group that has helped shape the contemporary discipline. Each interview is accompanied by a head-note that introduces the teacher-scholar and provides an overview of his or her main contributions to the field. Following the order of original publication, we begin with Toby Fulwiler from issue 1.1 (Fall 1989) and end with Linda Adler-Kassner, to be published in our Spring 2017 issue. What falls between includes such pivotal scholars as Linda Flower, James Berlin, Peter Elbow, Patricia Bizzell, Charles Bazerman, David Bartholomae, and Carolyn Miller, among many others. This group includes 18 of the authors in The Norton Book of Composition Studies and 12 of those in Victor Villanueva's seminal Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader.

Teachers on the Edge provides a breadth of insight impossible in any other format. Expressed in highly accessible, conversational styles, these interviews help historicize the broad scholarship in composition theory and pedagogy, while providing entertaining and accessible insights into the scholarly threads in modern composition studies, a must-read for graduate students, teachers of writing, and scholars.

John Boe is a Lecturer Emeritus at UC Davis. He received a BA from Amherst College and a PhD from UC Berkeley. He received the first UC Davis Excellence in Teaching Award, a Phi Beta Kappa Excellence in Teaching Award, and 1^st place in the HR Roberts’ Literary Awards. He has published more than a hundred articles and essays and his essay collection Life Itself. He was an editor of Writing on the Edge from 1989 to 2012. He performs as a professional storyteller and is currently completing a book of interviews, Living the Shakespearean Life.

David Masiel is a lecturer at UC Davis, where he has served as editor of Writing on the Edge since 2012. He teaches advanced composition, journalism, business writing, and a journal editing workshop for graduate students. His teaching career has spanned the high school, college, and university levels, where he has taught literature, creative writing, and professional writing. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Outside Magazine, and The Washington Post. He is the author of two novels: 2182 Kilohertz, a New York Times Notable Book in 2002 and The Western Limit of the World, both published by Random House.

Eric Schroeder was a lecturer at UC Davis from 1984 to 2014, where he taught a wide range of courses in Writing in the Disciplines and Writing in the Professions. He is co-founding editor of Writing on the Edge, serving for many years as Senior Editor, with primary responsibility for editing the WOE interviews. He received his bachelor’s degree in English literature and classical Greek from UCLA, his masters in Renaissance Studies from Sussex University, and his PhD in English from UCLA, where he examined American literary responses to the Vietnam War. His book, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, was published in 1992. He is the recipient of numerous university-wide teaching awards, including the James H. Meyer Distinguished Achievement Award and the Charles P. Nash Prize for commitment to shared governance.

Lisa Sperber is a faculty member in the University Writing Program at University of California, Davis, where she received her Ph.D. She teaches a range of professional writing classes, specializing in Writing in the Health Sciences, and first year composition. She also works on the program’s robust Writing Across the Curriculum team. Her interests include teaching for transfer, threshold concepts, the multilingual classroom, and WAC.