Bordered Writers

Examines innovative writing pedagogies and the experiences of Latinx student writers at Hispanic-Serving Institutions nationwide. Bordered Writers explores how writing program administrators and faculty at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) are transforming the teaching of writing to be more inclusive and foster Latinx student success. Like its 2007 predecessor, Teaching Writing with Latino/a Students, this collection contributes to ongoing conversations in writing studies about multicultural pedagogy and curriculum, linguistic diversity, and supporting students of color, while focusing further attention on the specific experiences and strategies of students and faculty at HSIs. Although members of Latinx communities comprise the largest underrepresented minority group in the nation, the needs and strengths of Latinx writers in college classrooms are seldom addressed. Bordered Writers thus helps to fill a critical gap, giving voice to past and present Latinx scholars, rhetoricians, and students, both in academic essays and in personal testimonios, in four pivotal areas: developmental English and bridge programs, first-year writing, professional and technical writing, and writing centers and mentored writing. Across contributions, the collection strives to connect all bordered writers and educators, making higher education today not only stronger but also more representative of the nation’s population. Isabel Baca is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is the editor of Service-Learning and Writing: Paving the Way for Literacy(ies) through Community Engagement. Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi. Susan Wolff Murphy is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi. She is the coeditor (with Cristina Kirklighter and Diana Cardenas) of Teaching Writing with Latino/a Students: Lessons Learned at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, also published by SUNY Press.

Designed to encourage readers to read and think critically, compassionately, and globally, this comprehensive collection of contemporary writing in English spotlights English as an international literary language. The broad range of genres from some of the world's finest writers, cross diverse gender, generational and ethnic lines. Breadth and quality of essays, memoirs, poems and stories cover such enduring themes as heritage, family, community, identity and autonomy, love and commitment, (post) colonization, the immigrant experience and alienation. For individuals interested in expanding the boarders of their reading to include a showcase of English language literature.

This book provides critical perspectives on issues relating to writing norms and assessment, as well as writing proficiency development, and suggests that scholars need to both carefully examine testing regimes and develop research-informed perspectives on tests and testing practices. In this way schools, institutions of adult education and universities can better prepare learners with differing cultural experiences to meet the challenges. The book brings together empirical studies from diverse geographical contexts to address the crossing of literacy borders, with a focus on academic genres and practices. Most of the studies examine writing in countries where the norms and expectations are different, but some focus on writing in a new discourse community set in a new discipline. The chapters shed light on commonalities and differences between these two situations with respect to the expectations and evaluations facing the writers. They also consider the extent to which the norms that the writers bring with them from their educational backgrounds and own cultures are compromised in order to succeed in the new educational settings.

Original and reprinted essays by contemporary poets who have spent time abroad address questions of estrangement, identity and home. These reflections represent a diverse atlas of experience and include work by Kazim Ali, Elizabeth Bishop, Naomi Shihab Nye, Nick Flynn, Charles Simic, Alissa Valles and others. Original.

“Remarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free.” —Peter Pomerantsev In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the “Red Riviera” on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime. Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off. Border is a scintillating, immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis troubling Europe, and a deep, witchy descent into interior and exterior geographies.

In Writers Without Borders: Writing and Teaching Writing in Troubled Times, Lynn Z. Bloom presents groundbreaking research on the nature of essays and on the political, philosophical, ethical, and pragmatic considerations that influence how we read, write, and teach them in times troubled by terrorism, transgressive students, and uses and abuses of the Internet. Writers Without Borders reinforces Bloom’s reputation for presenting innovative and sophisticated research with a writer’s art and a teacher’s heart. Each of the eleven essays addresses in its own way the essay itself as one way to live and learn with others.

In this stimulating and highly original study of the writing of American history, twenty-four scholars from eleven European countries explore the impact of writing history from abroad. Six distinguished scholars from around the world add their commentaries. Arguing that historical writing is conditioned, crucially, by the place from which it is written, this volume identifies the formative impact of a wide variety of institutional and cultural factors that are commonly overlooked. Examining how American history is written from Europe, the contributors shed light on how history is written in the United States and, indeed, on the way history is written anywhere. The innovative perspectives included in Historians across Borders are designed to reinvigorate American historiography as the rise of global and transnational history is creating a critical need to understand the impact of place on the writing and teaching of history. This book is designed for students in historiography, global and transnational history, and related courses in the United States and abroad, for US historians, and for anyone interested in how historians work.

The United States is outsourcing its border patrol abroad—and essentially expanding its borders in the process The twenty-first century has witnessed the rapid hardening of international borders. Security, surveillance, and militarization are widening the chasm between those who travel where they please and those whose movements are restricted. But that is only part of the story. As journalist Todd Miller reveals in Empire of Borders, the nature of US borders has changed. These boundaries have effectively expanded thousands of miles outside of US territory to encircle not simply American land but Washington’s interests. Resources, training, and agents from the United States infiltrate the Caribbean and Central America; they reach across the Canadian border; and they go even farther afield, enforcing the division between Global South and North. The highly publicized focus on a wall between the United States and Mexico misses the bigger picture of strengthening border enforcement around the world. Empire of Borders is a tremendous work of narrative investigative journalism that traces the rise of this border regime. It delves into the practices of “extreme vetting,” which raise the possibility of “ideological” tests and cyber-policing for migrants and visitors, a level of scrutiny that threatens fundamental freedoms and allows, once again, for America’s security concerns to infringe upon the sovereign rights of other nations. In Syria, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Miller finds that borders aren’t making the world safe—they are the frontline in a global war against the poor.

A transnational analysis with an emphasis on gender examines the work of women writers from both sides of the border writing in Spanish, English, or a mixture of the two languages whose work questions the accepted notions of border identities.