The East Central Writing Centers Association (ECWCA) Executive Board invites all current members to participate in the election process for our 2025 Executive Board. The election will run from November 11 through November 22, 2024. Members will receive an email inviting them to complete a poll.  

The following board roles are up for election, and at this time, the nomination period has closed.

• At-Large Representative
• Graduate Student Representative
• K-12 Representative
• Vice President

A description of all Board positions and a list of the responsibilities for each role can be found here in the ECWCA Constitution.  

To learn more about the nominees for this election cycle, please see the biographies below!

Candidate Biographies

Jackie Kauza, At-Large Representative

Starting writing center work as an undergraduate consultant, I continued engagement with writing centers through graduate school and into my assistant professorship. I currently head ECWCA’s Outreach Committee and serve as a mentoring editor for the ECWCA Journal. My major goals as a Board member have been to build community among writing center practitioners of all kinds in and beyond our region, to create opportunities for professional development for writing center folks, and to welcome new voices to the writing center community. In the past three years, I and the Outreach Committee have successfully launched Article of the Month Club, started a guest speaker series, and hosted conference preparation workshops for writing center practitioners new to ECWCA. I have opened our Article and Book Clubs and speaker series to the broader writing center community, connecting writing center practitioners across the county. As a founding member and mentoring editor of the ECWCA Journal, I remain committed to creating a supportive, constructive publication space for all writing center voices in our region, from student consultants and early-career scholars to established writing center practitioners. My hope is to continue and expand upon these initiatives in a second term as an at-large board member.

Mary Helen Truglia, At-Large Representative

I’ve worked in writing centers and writing tutoring broadly since 6th grade, but most directly beginning during my undergraduate experience at Whittier College (a SLAC). I helped to create a new Writing Centre at L-Universita ta’ Malta when I taught abroad, and was a tutor, writing group lead facilitator, and grad assistant director while in grad school. I'm currently the Director of Writing Tutorial Services at Indiana University, Bloomington. I am excited about the possibility of serving on the Board to assist with sharing programming and best practices across our region, to learn with and from other WCs, and to contend with new opportunities and challenges (including Generative AI and other digital innovations) that impact our WC work with students and instructors. I find it particularly important to continue our work on interdisciplinary programming/Writing Across the Curriculum and to focus on how to increase support for historically underserved student writers and tutors (first-generation, multilingual, students of color, students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, etc.). I hope to also raise discussions about collectively pushing for institutional support and funding amidst administrative change, strategic planning, a push for career readiness, and budgeting cuts (topics pertinent to many in our region).

 

Nicole Golden, Graduate Student Representative

Hi, there! I'm Nicole K. Golden, and I'm a first-generation college student who's pursuing her PhD at MSU in writing and rhetoric. I've had many roles across several WCs, and I'm passionate about writing center scholarship, language justice, and equity. I'm experienced supporting grad students inside and outside WC contexts, such as serving as president of MSU APIDA graduate organization and as grad assistant director in my current WC. In this region, I’ve actively engaged ECWCA since I moved here in 2022 by attending/presenting at annual conferences, serving as a journal reviewer, and co-authoring in the upcoming issue. Learning from and mentoring my peers and colleagues across these experiences has strengthened my interest in a long-term WC career as well as my love for this region. I hope to join the Board for the friends and community I’ll find as well as the professional development it will provide. If invited to serve as grad student representative, I’m committed and excited to represent graduate consultants in our region. Thanks for considering me!

Alexa Quezada, Graduate Student Representative

During the past two years, my writing center has been split between two pedagogies that drive our work—that of our student consultants, which aims to be anti-racist and anti-colonial, and that of our administrators, who take a more pro-establishment approach. I stand firmly in the former camp and have felt compelled, in the face of an assimilationist administration, to fight for a justice-oriented pedagogy. As a long-standing consultant and graduate student, I’ve endeavored to use my experience to mentor newer consultants and introduce them to writing scholarship that they may not otherwise have encountered in our center. I’ve advocated for and modeled projects, committees, research, and engagement with the larger writing center community, largely through ECWCA. Throughout this time, I’ve found resources and mentorship through this organization and passed these on to my peers. As a graduate representative, I hope to continue this practice, and not just for consultants in my own center. Graduate consultants hold a precarious position between faculty and student, made even more difficult to balance by these kinds of tensions between the institution and our own values. My goal is to connect with and become a voice for my peers across our region.

Jeffrey Austin, K-12 Representative 

Jeffrey (he/him/his) is a literacy consultant with the Wayne County Regional Educational Service Agency (RESA), working to support equitable, humanizing, and anti-racist literacy learning for students, teachers, coaches, and school leaders in 32 districts and over 100 public school academies in and around Detroit, Michigan. Prior to working at RESA, Jeffrey was an English and Social Studies teacher, an instructional coach, a department chair, and the founder and director for the Skyline High School Writing Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  He also served as the K-12 representative on the IWCA board.  Because of the hard work of students and community partners, Jeffrey was named one of the State of Michigan’s Innovative Educators in 2018 and received a grant to expand secondary school writing centers across Michigan’s Washtenaw County. Jeffrey is also the co-founder of the Growing Researchers of Environmental Equity Network (G.R.E.E.N.) in Wayne County, which is a project-and-place-based summer program that brings teachers and students together to use disciplinary literacies, especially writing, to advocate for more just and sustainable climate futures.

Megan Connor, Vice President

Megan Connor is the Writing Center Director at John Carroll University. She has been involved with writing centers for almost twenty years in a variety of capacities, including as an undergraduate tutor, graduate assistant director, director establishing a new WC in a high school, and now director at a small liberal arts college. Megan’s work with writing centers has taught her the importance of building relationships. Specifically, she had learned that listening to understand is essential to building strong relationships. In her role as Vice President, she plans to use this kind of listening to continue the community building ECWCA is already doing. Megan has already gotten so much out of being a part of the ECWCA community as an at-large board member and participant, and she sees the opportunity to serve as Vice President as a way for her to give back to a community she loves. 

Thank you for voting!

Our region benefits greatly from the guidance and support of an Executive Board that is assembled of volunteers from schools in our region. We hope you will help select our board by voting! If you have any questions or concerns, please contact ECWCA President, Christina Klimo, at  cklimo1@udayton.edu.

Thank you for your support of writing centers in our region.