Focusing on overt and covert violence and bringing attention to the many ways violence inflects and infects the teaching, administration, and scholarship of composition, Violence in the Work of Composition examines both forms of violence and the reciprocal relationships uniting them across the discipline. Addressing a range of spaces, the collection features chapters on classroom practices, writing centers, and writing program administration, examining the complicated ways writing instruction is interwoven with violence, as well as the equally complicated ways writing teachers may recognize and resist the presence and influence of violence in their work.
 
This book provides a focused, nuanced, and systematic discussion of violence and its presence and influence across pedagogical and administrative sites. Violence in the Work of Composition offers a close look at the nature of violence as it emerges in the work of composition; provides strategies for identifying violence, especially covert violence, addressing its impact and preventing its eruption across many sites; and invites readers to reflect on both the presence of violence and the hope for its cessation. Contributors consider, first, how compositionists can recognize the ways their work inadvertently enacts and/or perpetuates violence and, second, how they can intervene and mitigate that violence.
 
Rich with the voices of myriad stakeholders, Violence in the Work of Composition initiates an essential conversation about violence and literacy education at a time when violence in its many forms continues to shape our culture, communities, and educational systems.
 
Contributors: Kerry Banazek, Katherine Bridgman, Eric Camarillo, Elizabeth Chilbert Powers, Joshua Daniel, Lisa Dooley, Allison Hargreaves, Jamila Kareem, Lynn C. Lewis, Trevor Meyer, Cathryn Molloy, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, Ellen Skirvin, Krista Speicher Sarraf, Thomas Sura, James Zimmerman
 

Like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Robert Frost looms large in the American literary landscape, straddling the 19th and 20th centuries like a poetic colossus: whosoever desires passage must, at some point, contend with the monolithic presence of Robert Frost. As they did in Visiting Emily and Visiting Walt, in Visiting Frost, Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro once again capture the conversations between contemporary poets and a legend whose voice endures. In his introduction to the collection, Frost biographer Jay Parini likens the poet to a “great power station, one who stands off by himself in the big woods, continuously generating electricity that future poets can tap into for the price of a volume of his poems.” A four-time Pulitzer Prize winner whose work is principally associated with the landscape and life in New England, Frost (1874-1963) was a traditional, psychologically complex, often dark and intense poet. In Visiting Frost, one hundred homage-paying poets--some who knew Frost, most only acquainted through his work--celebrate and reflect that intensity, in effect tapping into his electrical current. By reacting to specific Frost poems, by reinventing others, and by remembering aspects of Frost or by quarreling with him, the contributors speak on behalf of us whose lives have been brightened by the memorization and recitation of such poems as “The Road Not Taken” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” As the poets pay tribute to Frost's place in American poetry and history, they suggest--more than forty years after his death--just how alive and vital he remains in our collective memory.