The University of Arizona Writing Program

Congratulations to Thais Rodrigues Cons on receiving the Amplification Award at the ATTW Annual Conference at UTEP last week!

Her research makes an important contribution to ongoing conversations in Technical and Professional Communication, exploring how bureaucratic genres intersect with equity and social justice. By examining institutional genres, literacy practices, and the ways Latin American practitioners challenge traditional frameworks, her work expands how we understand and practice technical communication.

Well deserved recognition for impactful and meaningful scholarship!

✨ Join Us at the Disability Studies Conference! ✨

We’re proud to highlight an upcoming panel featuring three incredible instructors from the University of Arizona Writing Programs—bringing insight, advocacy, and real classroom experience to an important conversation on equity and access in education.

📚 Crip Time for Educators: On Providing Equitable Support for Our Instructors and Students
🎤 Sylvia Chan, Emma Gomez, & Nataly Reed
📅 Wednesday, April 15
🕘 9:00–10:00 AM
📍 ENR2, Room S107 + Zoom option available

This powerful session explores how educators can better support neurodivergent and disabled students while rethinking traditional academic expectations around time, productivity, and access.

👉 Register to attend (in person or via Zoom): https://bit.ly/UADisCon2026

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Wed, Apr. 15 at ENR2, Room S107, 9-10 AM
Crip Time for Educators: On Providing Equitable Support for Our Instructors and Students by Sylvia Chan, Emma Gomez, and Nataly Reed
As long-time educators for the University of Arizona Writing Programs, we are disabled and allied teachers, advocates, and artists who integrate disability justice into our culturally relevant pedagogy, access needs, and classes. Inspired by Ellen Samuels’ crip time, we seek to center aspects of non-linear time and alternative methods to teaching in response to academic and normative constraints. Crip time may encompass our access needs in seeking workplace support, without being stigmatized for “being a problem.” This advocacy is what we also seek to accomplish for our students. We question how can individual instructors build on their current awareness to create successful learning environments with neurodivergent students? While instructors in higher education are highly trained in their disciplines, a majority learn their best practices in pedagogy and curriculum on the job. Well-intentioned instructors may meet legal and institutional requirements but struggle to work successfully with neurodivergent students in their classrooms. Alice Wong states in her memoir, Year of the Tiger, that her working relationship with former UCSF administrator, Eric Koening, was an “equal partner[ship],” something “that […] most people wouldn’t imagine between a student and an [educator]” (2022). Unlike Wong’s experiences, faculty and disabled students are losing valuable partnerships and community for higher profit margins and superficial enrollment numbers. Crip time is imperative because it is time working with our disabled students and providing support that can ask for more constructive labor from the instructors. We hope to consider what re-envisioning our time—time to be disabled, time to grieve, time to be broken, and time, unexpected—can embody in response to or in a world of productive, fast-paced, and ableist academy. This presentation offers practical resources such as reflection questions, checklists, and recommended media.

WP lecturer Lydia Pear invites you to join us this Wednesday evening for our monthly Keep It Together! Reading Series 📚

Take a well-deserved pause from the mid-semester rush and find a little inspiration with readings from Kirk Wisland and Simmons Buntin.

Come listen, reflect, and recharge—we’d love to see you there! ✨

Join the Discourse Series tonight!

🗓 February 24
⏰ 7:00 PM
📍 Modern Languages 411

UA Writing Programs will present "Making Borderlands Visible: Self-Placement Innovation for Culturally Responsive Writing at an HSI" at the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Institution Educators' (AHSIE) conference this year! This presentation will feature innovations in placement and enrollment for Borderlands Writing courses at UA, created in support of our students ni de aquí, ni de allá–those from the liminal spaces between two different worlds, cultures, languages, and identities—helping all students build a sense of belonging at the university through a place-based, culturally responsive writing curriculum.

UA Writing Programs will present “Making Borderlands Visible: Self-Placement Innovation for Culturally Responsive Writing at an HSI” at the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Institution Educators’ (AHSIE) conference this year! This presentation will feature innovations in placement and enrollment for Borderlands Writing courses at UA, created in support of our students ni de aquí, ni de allá–those from the liminal spaces between two different worlds, cultures, languages, and identities—helping all students build a sense of belonging at the university through a place-based, culturally responsive writing curriculum.






HispanicServingInstitution
AHSIE2026 Boston

✨ These readings kick off this week! ✨
Join The Reading Series as they feature some of the incredible lecturers from the Writing Program. Starting this Wednesday at Revel, 6:30 PM, and you won’t want to miss it.

Come listen, learn, and celebrate great writing with us—see you there! 📚✍️

✨ Big congratulations to David A. Reyes! ✨

His debut book, A Symptom of Continuity, is the winner of the 2025 Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize and is forthcoming from Conduit Books & Ephemera in 2026. This exciting recognition celebrates Reyes’s powerful contributions to contemporary poetry and Borderlands storytelling.

Born and raised in El Paso, TX, David A. Reyes now lives in Tucson, AZ, where he teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Arizona. He is a former Project ADELANTE collaborator and a 2025 Digital Borderlands in the Classroom Faculty Fellow, supported by a Mellon Foundation grant through the University of Arizona Libraries. His work centers Borderlands storytelling, digital scholarship, and archival literacy.

His writing has appeared in Huizache, Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Bayou Review, Pilgrimage, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere.

🔗 Learn more about the prize: https://www.conduit.org/book-prizes

📚 A Symptom of Continuity — coming soon!

Papers were graded and fun was had at our end-of-semester grading collaborative 🎉
Huge thank you to our wonderful staff who planned it all for us — we appreciate you! 💙

The Writing Center is hosting a Finals Countdown WriteNite on Wednesday, December 10th from 4–9 PM in the Main Library (rooms A210–213)! ✍️📚

They’ll have snacks, plenty of space to write, and tutors available for drop-in help with any kind of writing — portfolio assignments, final projects, applications, and more.

Open to all undergraduate and graduate students. Come get that end-of-semester work done! 🎓✨