COMPOSITION STUDIES BY DIANE K. OLSON, PHD, WRITING, TEACHING AND CRITICISM

I have a vision for starting up a center for writing/composition studies that foregrounds advocacy, visionary, ministerial and social/institutional justice writing -- all forms of writing that I am highly experienced in teaching.  I have taught at the State University of New York at Albany, Georgia Tech in Atlanta and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in composition studies and poetics and cultural studies, and for the past decade, I have been writing and blogging as an advocate and a minister, and I would like to get back to a teaching position soon (in the fall of 2017) where I can teach advocacy and social justice writing, in particular, and hopefully, build this writing studies center on a campus that would be congenial to and welcoming of my vision for the center, as I have outlined this vision in my writings on this blog.  If you are part of a composition/writing studies program that would be interested in hiring me (my CV is posted on the side bar of this website) and allowing me to teach these forms of writing that I am so passionate about and invested in teaching, I would appreciate hearing from you -- I can be reached at the email address [email protected]  and I am currently in Iowa but would be willing to relocate.  I emphasize advocacy writing because we live in a world that is in great need of advocates for the oppressed, vulnerable and marginalized  -- people who can clearly and passionately communicate and advocate for the needs of people who are vulnerable and marginalized and whose needs have been overlooked by our American culture and our institutions.  And I emphasize visionary writing because we need people who can creatively reimagine and reinvent the institutions that currently exist and make them more humane and more compassionate and more responsive to the needs of the marginalized and forgotten of our society. And I emphasize social/institutional justice writing because we need more young people who care about bringing light and justice to those people experiencing oppression -- in all of its various forms -- in our culture and abroad.  And, finally, I emphasize ministerial writing because it is some of the most compassionate and loving and caring writing that our students and ourselves can do to heal what is broken in our culture and in our universities.  These are the four forms of writing that I am very gifted at teaching -- along with my life-long work in poetics and cultural studies -- and I am looking for a university or a college that is welcoming of these visions of writing and would assist me in starting this center for writing and composition studies that features these forms of writing.  I would greatly appreciate hearing from you and your program is you are interested in bringing me aboard as a teaching faculty this fall semester (2017). If you have the opportunity, please read some of my writing on this blog, which further details my visions for  the teaching of writing and composition.  Thank you for your time.  Sincerely, Diane K. Olson