Dear colleagues,
We are excited to announce a call for proposals for our edited collection, Being Well while Writing: Reimagining Values for Graduate Student Writing Support.
Call for Proposals
Graduate writing is a high-stakes, often anxiety-fraught process that too often leads to dread and avoidance. Faculty, mentors, and writing program administrators can help graduate students experience wellbeing while writing. In advising, courses, and programs, they can encourage graduate students to transform their view of writing from an impediment to wellbeing into a process of learning, growth, and even joy as they become experts in their disciplines and professions. This edited collection, Being Well while Writing: Reimagining Values for Graduate Student Writing Support, positions graduate students’ writing as a site of meaning-making, interconnection, empowerment, and joy that can function as a pathway toward greater wellbeing. It is intended to serve as a guide for educators who aim to integrate attention to wellbeing into their work with graduate students through a values-driven framework.
We solicit proposals for chapters to be included in Being Well while Writing: Reimagining Values for Graduate Student Writing Support. Each 3500-word chapter should center on a core value for graduate student writing and detail how that value informs the authors’ graduate writing pedagogy, program, mentoring, or advising. We seek perspectives that move beyond working to help graduate students reduce their writing anxiety and instead reframe graduate-level writing as a practice of possibility. Taken together, these chapters will constitute a values-driven framework for graduate student writing instruction that shifts the current conversation away from stress reduction and toward healthier, more productive framing of the work of writing.
We encourage contributions from educators across the disciplines and professions, in varied graduate-level curricular contexts (e.g., certificate, masters, doctoral, academic, and professional), with global and multicultural perspectives on writing and wellbeing.
Examples of values contributors might center include, but are not limited to:
- Interconnection
- Non-reactivity
- Non-attachment
- Self-compassion
- Self-trust
- Authenticity
- Curiosity
- Empowerment
- Joy
We will organize the volume based on the emergent values proposed by contributors.
Once writers identify a value for writing they seek to communicate to their graduate students, they should detail how this value appears in their practices, programs, or pedagogies. This section of each chapter should offer readers a model they can adapt for implementation in their own contexts, whether that is a course, lab group, writing program, or advising relationship.
Anticipated Timeline
Proposals due: December 1, 2025
Notification of acceptance: Mid to late January 2026
Chapters due: April 2026
Editorial feedback: July 2026
Final manuscripts due: October 2026
Format
500-word proposals in APA style that identify a value for graduate student writing and detail how that value is communicated through a practice, program, or pedagogy. Authors should also submit 250-word biography statements that include the wellbeing practices that sustain their work.
We welcome inquiries and conversations ahead of the proposal due date. Please send your questions and proposals to Katharine Brown (brownkh and Christopher Basgier (crb0085.
Be well,
Chris (with Katharine Brown)
Christopher Basgier, Ph.D.
Director of University Writing | Auburn University Office of the Provost
Associate Publisher for Operations and Equity | The WAC Clearinghouse
3436 RBD Library
Auburn, AL 36849-5279
chris.basgier
Pronouns: he/him/his
Pronunciation: Bass-gear