Judith Summerfield

Judith Summerfield

 

“How do we tell stories of our lives?

And how do the worlds we come from––place and time,

culture and history, family, class, gender, race, religion,

the roles we play, and the languages we speak––

shape our lives, the work we do, and the stories we tell?”

 

These are the opening lines of my latest book, Compositions, A Life: An Autoethnography, where I tell stories of my life and work, how I grew up in a coal-mining town in southwestern Pennsylvania and found my way to New York City to become a professor of English at Queens College (CUNY) and a writer or editor of ten books. Compositions, A Life is also a book that invites my readers to take up a pen and a notebook to compose their own stories.

My ninth book, A Man Comes from Someplace: Stories, History, Memory from a Lost Time (Brill, 2018, second edition) is drawn from the stories my father told of his early years in Ukraine, and his escape to the United States during the Russian Revolution. I also tell of my visit to Ukraine in 2011, to find the remnants of the world that my father described. I introduced the first edition of the book and led a writing workshop at the Jewish Community Center in Krakow, Poland.

During my career as a Professor of English, I wrote the following books on teaching composition and literature:

Negotiations: A Reader for Writers. Random House, 1992.

Reading(s) (with G. Summerfield). Random House, 1989.

Texts and Contexts: A Contribution to the Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition (with G. Summerfield). Random House, 1986. (MLA Shaughnessy Prize,1987)

Frames of Mind: A Course in Composition (with G. Summerfield). Random House, 1986.

The Random House Guide to Writing (with S. Schor). 3rd Ed., Random House, 1986.

Responding to Prose. Bobbs-Merrill, 1983.

I also developed programs to bring faculty and administrators together to build academic communities for students and faculty. As the University Dean for Undergraduate Education at The City University of New York, I worked with students, faculty and administrators from all 24 undergraduate colleges. That project led to my editing the following two collections:

Transformative Spaces in Higher Education: Making Teaching and Learning Matter (with Crystal Benedicks). Springer, 2011.

Reclaiming the Public University: Conversations on Liberal and General Education (with Cheryl Smith). Peter Lang, 2007.

During my teaching/writing life, I directed a number of national projects and grants, and received several achievement awards: The Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (Freshmen Year Project), Ford Foundation Diversity Grant, Mellon Fellowship to study narrative in film, Hesburgh Award for Faculty Development, Queens College President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the New York State Professor of the Year Award from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In 2018, I was named a Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Pittsburgh School of Education.