Professor William P. Banks, PhD, serves as Director of the University Writing Program at East Carolina University, in addition to serving as Director of the Tar River Writing Project. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric and composition, children’s literature, gay and lesbian studies, and women’s studies.
He is currently working on several scholarly books over the next two years: 1) Queer Rhetorics (monograph) explores the rhetorical and discursive work of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities as a series of persuasive/world-making practices; 2) Failing Sideways: Queering Writing Assessment (co-authored book) works to reframe our most cherished practices around writing assessment in order to expand our thinking about the ways that writing, grading, evaluation, and assessment intersect; and 3) Making Literacy (co-authored book) looks at the recent “maker movement” and demonstrates how K-12 teachers have implemented maker-oriented teaching practices in order to engage students in a host of Connected Learning practices.
Will has recently edited five collections of original scholarship: 1) English Studies Online: Programs, Practices, Possibilities (co-edited with Susan Spangler, 2021) explores the nuanced ways that English Studies has moved instruction into online spaces in order to engage a broader range of students; 2) Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects (co-edited with Matthew B. Cox and Caroline Dadas, 2019) offers multiple examples of the ways that LGBTQ scholars in writing studies have revised traditional research methods in order to study writing/composing in new and innovative ways; 3) Curricular Innovations: LGBTQ Literatures and the New English Studies (co-edited with John Pruitt, 2019) explores the impact that queer literatures/theories have had in reshaping undergraduate English courses; 4) Approaches to Teaching LGBT Literature (co-edited with John Pruitt, 2018) offers insights into the many and varied LGBT literature courses being taught at the college level and demonstrates how far those courses have come in the last forty years; and 5) Reclaiming Accountability: Using the Work of Re/Accreditation and Large-Scale Assessment to Improve Writing Instruction and Writing Programs (co-edited with Wendy Sharer, Tracy Ann Morse, and Michelle Eble, 2016), which looks at the sort of changes writing programs can effect when they leverage moments of large-scale assessment.
Recent chapters have appeared in the following books: Beyond Borders: Eros and Ethos (Ethics) in LGBTQ Young Adult Literature (2016), The Next Digital Scholar: A Fresh Approach to the Common Core Standards in Research and Writing (2014), A Rhetoric for Writing Program Administrators (2016, 2013), Working with Faculty Writers (2013), Higher Education, Emerging Technologies, and Community Partnerships: Concepts, Models, Applications (2011), The Writing Program Interrupted (2009), and Transforming English Studies (2009).
His co-edited special issue of Computers and Composition (“Sexualities, Technologies, and the Teaching of Writing”) won the 2005 Ellen Nold Award for distinguished contribution to the field of Computers and Writing; other articles have appeared in WPA: Writing Program Administrator, College Composition & Communication, College English, Dialogue: A Journal for Writing Specialists, Illinois English Journal, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College.
In his spare time, Will continues to plug away at his young adult novel, Darkness Like a Dream, while he looks for a publisher for his children’s picture book about his delightfully irrepressible dog Max.