2026 Kairos Awards Announcement for the C&W Conference Awards Ceremony Saturday, June 6
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, is pleased to announce its 2026 award winners! Congratulations to the winners for their outstanding achievements.
Thank you, also, to our award readers for their service: Chris Andrews, Cheryl Ball, Ashley Beardsley, Brandy Dieterle, Doug Eyman, Ashanka Kumari, Kristi McDuffie, Olivia McMurray, Nicole O’Connell, Jennifer Colleen Reilly, David Rieder, Sano-Franchini, and Charles Woods.
And we are ever grateful for our awards co-chairs, Kristi McDuffie and Brandy Dieterle, for their diligence and effort in coordinating these awards, which produced the following winners:
Vyshali Manivannan (she/hers) (Pace University, nominated by 10 colleagues) has been awarded the 2026 Kairos Best Webtext Award for “perimortem [in (theoretical) rigor]” published in Kairos Issue 29.2. This award recognizes the best academic webtext published during the previous calendar year. In this particular instance, Vy’s piece is an excerpt from her keynote address at the 2024 Computers & writing conference. Committee members appreciated the innovation and use of interaction fiction to “confront academic players with their complicity in the cycle of harm perpetuated in academic writing.” The argument and design were noted to demonstrate depth, complexity, and sophistication as it draws on non-Western epistemologies.
Maggie Fernandes, Megan McIntyre, and Jennifer Sano-Franchini are the recipients of the 2026 John Lovas Award for their co-authored webtext “Refusing Generative AI in Writing Studies.” This award recognizes an outstanding online project devoted to academic pursuits. Committee members highlighted the “extremely timely and necessary” ways in which this piece supports community building such that “offers a space to not just critique, but refuse AI—a perspective that can often seem unpopular in higher education.” One reader described this work as part of a “wave-making movement” with another noting that “Fernandes, McIntyre, and Sano-Franchini valiantly and impressively articulate their reasonings for why we should refuse AI—and, importantly, allow our students to refuse AI.”
Liping Yang (she/her, Georgia State University, self-nominated) has been awarded the 2026 Kairos Graduate Student and Contingent Faculty Award for Service, which recognizes activities that promote excellent computers and writing pedagogy, theory, and community building. Yang has been developing ethically and theoretically based AI materials as an AI Pedagogy Specialist in the First-Year Writing Program at Georgia State University, including hosting workshops for instructors, contributing to a textbook chapter, and developing training materials. This service has extended into the discipline through an impressive number of publications and conference presentations, where Yang is sharing this exigent knowledge base within and being computers and writing. Readers valued their initiative and success that has supported students and faculty in the digital writing community.
Trent Wintermeier (he/his, University of Texas at Austin, self-nominated) has been awarded the 2026 Kairos Graduate Student and Contingent Faculty Award for Teaching, which recognizes the use of computers and writing pedagogies in their classroom-based practice to promote student learning. Readers found his contributions to be outstanding, as they illustrate strong innovation with upper-level classes and integration of various technologies including AI and audio. He uses labor-based contract grading and adapts courses to make them accessible to various audiences.
Marie Pruitt (she/hers, University of Louisville, nominated by Derek Mueller, University of Michigan) has been awarded the 2026 Kairos Graduate Student and Contingent Faculty Award for Scholarship, which recognizes a pattern of excellent scholarship and/or the promise of future excellent scholarship. Pruitt’s scholarship evidences the spirit of this award given exigent research areas from data visualization to citational patterns, with two single-authored publications in top venues in our field. Her reader noted that “her research agenda is crystal clear, engaging, and relevant to multiple subcommunities in our field” and that her portfolio is rounded out with “collaborative and editorial work.”