Writing in this Moment

Event Date: 4/21/2020

How do we write about, and during, this time of uncertainty? How do we focus on our writing when we are navigating so many personal and professional roles? In a discussion moderated by Associate Professor Michael Rozendal (Rhetoric and Language), Professor Lara Bazelon (Law), Associate Professor Rick Ayers (Teacher Education), and Professor Susan Steinberg (English), will discuss the impact of COVID-19 on their writing practice, creative works, and public scholarship. Through personal, academic, cultural and socio-political perspectives, the panel will share examples of writing practice and some of the challenges and tensions writers face. They will entertain suggestions and questions about the writing projects of audience members, such as approaches to journaling, blogging, and other writing relevant to the moment we find ourselves in.

Moderator

Michael Rozendal is an Associate Professor in the Rhetoric and Language Department and Academic Director of the Undergraduate Teacher Education Center. His research focuses on the international and local intersections of print culture, politics, and aesthetics. With first year seminars like “Writing about Movements”, his teaching ranges among rhetoric, composition, public speaking, print culture, digital humanities, modernist studies, Twentieth-century literature, working-class literature, postmodernism, materialist theory, and regionalism.

Panelists

Rick Ayers is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of San Francisco. His research and writing focuses on social justice issues. He is author or co-author of a number of books, including Teaching the Taboo, You can’t fire the bad ones: And 18 other myths about teachers, teachers unions, and public education, and An Empty Seat in Class: Teaching and Learning after the Death of a Student. He has written more than 100 blogs for the Huffington Post and now writes a regular blog for Medium.com.

Lara Bazelon is a Professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law where she holds the Phillip and Muriel Barnett Chair in Trial Advocacy and directs the Criminal & Juvenile and Racial Justice Clinics. She writes frequently about criminal justice, restorative justice, feminism, and the life of working mothers. Her op-eds and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Magazine, Slate, Politico Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times, among other outlets.

Susan Steinberg is a Professor of English at the University of San Francisco and author of four books of fiction, most recently, Machine and Spectacle from Graywolf Press. Her work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Gettysburg Review, Zyzzyva, Bomb online, The Believer online, American Short Fiction, and other literary journals. She has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Magazine Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, and she was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2020.