A graduate of Broughton High School in Raleigh, NC (alma mater of writers Reynolds Price, Anne Tyler, and Armistead Maupin), I received the A.B. in English from Davidson College (NC) in 1983. After a year teaching high school in East Africa, I moved to Washington, DC, where for two years I was managing editor of the Youth Policy Institute, founded in 1979 by David Hackett. In 1987, I began work on the M.A. in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I then taught composition and literature for two years at Laredo Community College in south Texas, and in 1991 began work on the PhD in Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University, where I wrote a dissertation on rhetorical practices in the design professions. From 1996 to 1998, I was assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University, and, from 1998 to 2006, assistant and then associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I directed both English 100 (freshman composition) and English 201 (intermediate composition). I am currently professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I have directed (2007-2011) the University Writing Program (which won, in 2009, the Certificate of Excellence from CCCC), helped lead (2011-2015) the University’s Common Read, and directed (2018-2023) Undergraduate Studies in English. I teach courses in writing and composition-rhetoric, and I am active in the national discipline of rhetoric and writing studies, serving on the editorial boards of Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2007-2011), and Written Communication (1999-2022). I have written two books: City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America (SUNY, 2008) and From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957-1974 (Pittsburgh, 2011), which won the Outstanding Book Award from CCCC and the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize from MLA. I have also published numerous articles, including “Fear of Persuasion in the English Language Arts,” which won the 2019 Richard Ohmann Award from NCTE. I am currently at work on a book about the past, present, and future of the bachelor’s degree in the United States, tentatively titled American Baccalaureate.