Awards

Coalition for Community Writing awards are given at the biennial Conference on Community Writing™ in the categories of:

Distinguished Engaged Scholar in Community Writing Award

The Distinguished Engaged Scholar in Community Writing Award is presented to an individual who has made a significant contribution to community writing, which includes scholarship areas such as service-learning, community-based research, community literacy, ethnography, community publishing, advocacy, and activist writing. The nominee should be a practitioner-scholar who could be a college faculty member, teacher, or administrator with a publishing record on community writing. Nominees for this award should clearly demonstrate a sustained and distinguished track record of:

  1. Writing for and with others, with an impact on the well-being of a region or area
  2. Using writing to build and sustain networks of advocacy and support across institutional boundaries such as schools, colleges, neighborhood centers, non-profits, or government agencies
  3. Innovating new methods of organizing and fostering community writing in diverse and multimodal contexts
  4. Fostering reciprocal and culturally sensitive projects that “write community”—strengthening social, economic, and cultural bonds constitutive of healthy local or advocacy groups.

Previous award winners include:

  • 2022: Paula Mathieu
  • 2021: Beverly Moss
  • 2020: Dr. Steve Parks
  • 2019: Dr. Elaine Richardson
  • 2017: Ellen Cushman
  • 2015: Eli Goldblatt
Emerging Scholars Award

The Coalition for Community Writing actively works for antiracism and decoloniality in the academic fields, the community and government organizations, and the home communities of our members. Too often community-engaged scholars’ work is delegitimized or ignored, called service rather than scholarship, leading to isolation, lack of support and mentorship, and threats to security. This reality is heightened for BIPOC students and scholars. We denounce the long and ongoing legacy of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and violence against the intellectual ideas, bodies, and mental wellbeing of BIPOC students, colleagues, community partners, and loved ones.  

In response, the Coalition for Community Writing, in collaboration with the American Indian Caucus, the Asian/Asian American Caucus, the Black Caucus, the Latinx Caucus, and DBLAC, has created The Conference on Community Writing Emerging Scholars Award for BIPOC graduate students and faculty. We particularly welcome applications from graduate students, adjuncts, non-tenure track faculty, and faculty without other funding sources, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA people at community colleges, HBCUs, HSIs, and tribal colleges. If you are from one or from multiple/intersectional eligible group(s) and an emerging scholar, you are eligible to apply. No prior conference or presentation experience is necessary. Ongoing mentorship is part of the award.

Criteria: The selection committee will consider Black, Latinx, Asian/Asian American, American Indian/Indigenous, and Pacific Islander faculty and graduate students, regardless of citizenship status. Applicants must be current graduate students, post-docs, or in their first five years as an adjunct or faculty member. 

2021-2023 Emerging Scholars:

  • Sweta Baniya
  • Genesis Barco-Medina
  • Christopher E. Castillo
  • Tabitha Espina
  • Tracey Flores
  • Erin Green
  • Mohammed Iddrisu
  • Charisse Hope Sayo Iglesias
  • Logan Middleton
  • Hugh Pressley
  • Thea Robertson
  • Elizabeth Rule
  • Benesemon Simmons
  • Teigha VanHester
  • Bernardita M. Yunis Varas
  • Keahnan Washington
  • Raymond Two Hawks Watson
  • Patience Williams 
Outstanding Book in Community Writing

The Outstanding Book Award is presented for the most outstanding book in community writing, which includes the areas of service learning, community-based research, community literacy, ethnography and memoir, community publishing, advocacy, and activist writing. Eligible books will be situated within the broad, historical traditions of rhetoric and composition, literacy studies, and related disciplines and should substantially draw on and/or contribute to scholarship about, for, with, and by local or global communities. The award committee will consider both print and digital monographs, as well as edited collections.

Previous award winners include:

  • 2021: Rachael Wendler Shah’s Rewriting Partnerships
  • 2021: April Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice
  • 2021: Aja Martinez’s Counterstory
  • 2019: Dr. Steven Alvarez’s Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies
  • 2019: Dr. Patrick Berry’s Doing Time, Writing Lives: Refiguring Literacy and Higher Education in Prison
  • 2019: Dr. Candace Epps-Robertson’s Resisting Brown: Race, Literacy, & Citizenship in the Heart of Virginia
  • 2017: Eric Darnell Pritchard’s Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy
Outstanding College-Community Project

The Outstanding College-Community Project Award honors high-impact initiatives developed or sustained through university/college-community partnerships that embody a spirit of collaboration and reciprocity.  Appropriate projects should build on the strengths and expertise of both college and community partners and meet standards of success developed jointly between college and community partners.

The initiatives may be short- or long-term, and they may be based on service-learning, community engagement, and/or community-based research models at two- or four-year institutions.  They may include undergraduate-, graduate-, faculty-, and administrative-level contributions to the collaboration with the community. Community partners may include individuals, non-profit organizations having a 501(c)3 status (or comparable status), government agencies (e.g. city schools), and for-profit organizations with philanthropic activities.

Submissions for this award should clearly demonstrate the following: 1) a reciprocal partnership in the process of organizing, running, and evaluating the project; 2) commitment to literacy and/or writing; 3) articulation of clear, useful project outcomes and impacts; and 4) a commitment to sustainability of the partnership, the service-learning model, or the community-based research study.

Previous award winners include:

Nominations for each award are valid for three years (two conference cycles). A call for nominations goes out in the Spring before each conference. Please check back in Spring 2023 for the next call.

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