Shannon Carter

Shannon Carter, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Commerce, has published on various aspects of text-use and production among local publics--from inmates (Community Literacy Journal, 2008) to evangelicals (College English, 2007), from campus administrators (College Composition and Communication, 2009) to at-risk writers (Journal of Basic Writing, 2006). Her first book, The Way Literacy Lives (State University of New York Press, 2008), brings these themes together to argue for more systematic attention to literacy experiences beyond the university. In 2007, based on this approach and attention to new media's role in our increasingly complex literate lives, Carter began working with colleages to establish the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC), a research center designed to study the literate lives of local citizens and students (see Kairos, Fall 2009, and Computers and Composition Online, forthcoming). She is currently at work on a book-length project about citizen discourse enacting change at local levels in the decades immediately following racial integration in southern university towns like the one hosting the March 2011 conference. Fall 2010 A&M-C granted Carter leave to pursue this project, which is tentatively entitled "Writing for a Change: Race, Activism, and Local Politics in a Southern, Rural University Town."