Fields of Reading: Motives for Writing

NANCY R. COMLEY is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Queens College, City University of New York.  In addition to Fields, she has co-edited The Practice of Writing and Text Book for Bedford/St. Martin's, and is co-author with Robert Scholes of Hemingway's Genders (Yale UP). She has also directed the writing program at the University of Oklahoma.

DAVID HAMILTON is a Professor of English at the University of Iowa where he has directed the MFA program in literary nonfiction and edited The Iowa Review. His essays have been published in numerous journals, including the Connecticut Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and College English; his books are Ossabaw (Salt Publishing) and Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm (University of Missouri Press).

CARL H. KLAUS, Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa and founding director of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, currently serves as co-editor (with Patricia Hampl) of Sightline Books: the University of Iowa Press Series in Literary Nonfiction. Essayist, diarist, and memoirist, Klaus is the author of My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season (Houghton Mifflin); Weathering Winter: A Gardener’s Daybook (University Of Iowa Press); Taking Retirement: A Beginner’s Diary (Beacon Press); and Letters to Kate: Life after Life (University of Iowa Press). He is also the co-author or co-editor of several textbooks on writing.

ROBERT SCHOLES, professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, is a distinguished teacher and a scholar in literary studies. He has published many influential books and articles, including The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (1998); Protocols of Reading (1989); and Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985), which won the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize of the Modern Language Association in 1986 and the David H. Russell Research Award from NCTE in 1988. Scholes is a contributor of numerous articles and book reviews to learned journals, literary magazines, and weekly reviews.

Well-known for her research and publications on student writing, Dr. NANCY SOMMERS led the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University for 21 years, and now teaches writing and mentors new teachers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. She has co-authored six textbooks, including A Writer’s Reference (Bedford/St.Martin’s), and has received numerous awards for her teaching, research, and writing, including the prestigious Braddock Award, which she has received twice. Dr. Sommers’ most recent work involves a longitudinal study of 400 students from the Harvard Class of 2001 to understand the role writing plays in undergraduate education.

JASON TOUGAW is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Queens College. He is author of Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel (Routledge, 2006) and co-editor, with Nancy K. Miller, of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (University of Illinois Press). Currently, his writing focuses on connections between neurobiology and the arts, new media pedagogies, and creative nonfiction. He has published essays and creative nonfiction in JAC, Computers & Composition, a/b: Auto/biography Studies, and the anthology Boys to Men: Gay Men Write about Growing Up.