Waite's new book explores queer pedagogy of writing

Stacey Waite and the cover of TEACHING QUEER

April 26, 2017

Associate Professor Stacey Waite's latest work, Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing was released earlier this month by the University of Pittsburg Press. To celebrate, a reading and reception will be held at Indigo Bridge Bookstore on Wednesday, May 10 at 6pm.

Part of the Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture, Teaching Queer looks closely at student writing, transcripts of class discussions, and teaching practices in first-year writing courses to articulate queer theories of literacy and writing instruction, while also considering the embodied actuality of being a queer teacher. Rather than positioning queerness as connected only to queer texts or queer teachers/students (as much work on queer pedagogy has done since the 1990s), the book offers writing and teaching as already queer practices, and contends that the overlap between queer theory and composition presents new possibilities for teaching writing. Teaching Queer argues for and enacts “queer forms”—non-normative and category-resistant forms of writing—those that move between the critical and the creative, the theoretical and the practical, and the queer and the often invisible normative functions of classrooms. 

"Teaching Queer is a great read that blends personal narrative, real-life teaching from the author, student work, and high theory to get at the question: What might a queer pedagogy of writing look like?" said Michigan State University's Jacqueline Rhodes.  Jan Cooper of Oberlin College called it "A well-crafted exploration of how queer theory can address the hardest task of composition teachers: challenging students to use writing as a way of thinking."

Stacey Waite is the director of the Composition and Rhetoric program and the author of four poetry collections, Butch Geography (Tupelo Press, 2013), the lake has no saint (Tupelo Press, 2010), Love Poem to Androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2006) and Choke (Thorngate Road, 2004). In addition to her written verse, Waite writes and performs slam poetry, coaches collegiate and high school slam poets, and serves as a teaching artist and for the Nebraska Writers Collective and its teen poetry festival, Louder Than a Bomb: Great Plains.