Remembering Voices of the Past, Advocating for the Voices of the Future: A 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Wyoming Resolution—and a Call to Active Administration
Summer Workshop: July 20-22, 2026
Annual Conference: July 23-25, 2026
From the stories we tell one another, it is clear that many of us regard ourselves as victimized by our institutions, relegated to marginal positions and tenuous employment with no benefits. [ . . . ] Those stories were told over breakfast in the dining hall, during coffee-breaks between sessions, and in late-night talks after the honky-tonk bands playing at Laramie’s nightspots had finished the last set.
Robertson, Crowley, and Lentricchia, 277
If the Wyoming Conference Resolution begins with the felt needs of writing teachers, the anecdotal accounts and individual testimonies we have all heard about injustice and exploitation, it goes on to link these felt needs, the points at which the personal becomes political in the lives of writing teachers, to the need for wider and more sweeping changes in the role of English Studies and the priorities of higher education.
Trimbur and Cambridge, 17
[W]e are still on the road from Wyoming. [ . . . T]here is clearly more work to be done, especially as we face increasingly challenging economic times, and as institutions employ even more contingent faculty than ever before. The work begun by those who formulated the Wyoming Resolution is far from done, and it should not be forgotten or abandoned.
McDonald and Schell, 375
Those who have written on the history of the 1986 Wyoming Conference on English paint a heady picture of the events of the conference, a disciplinary turning point full of spontaneity, tough talk, raw emotion, and most of all the kind of grassroots political momentum that led to a watershed moment in the field. Shortly after CWPA’s ratification of the Wyoming Resolution, John Trimbur and Barbara Cambridge documented that it was written “following a remarkable release of the anger and bitterness so deeply felt in the rank and file of writing teachers—anger about the poor conditions that make it difficult to teach properly and bitterness about the insecurity and powerlessness of so many who teach writing” (13). They unpack how that disciplinary moment—“a moment of upswing in our profession that makes us less willing to accept the old conditions and the old explanations” (15)—took on an energy of its own through the personal stories shared at the conference, stories that finally challenged composition’s national organizations to do something to affect change. As Trimbur and Cambridge suggested, the stories that prompted “the Wyoming Conference Resolution should be seen not just as an end in itself but as an initiator” (17).
Not as an end, but as an initiator.
Like our intellectual forebears did at the 1986 Wyoming Conference on English and beyond1, we see no better way of galvanizing this year’s conference than to call for explicit attention to sharing stories to elicit change. As an organization, CWPA has been in a season of critical reflection and reorientation, in part inspired by the outside consultant One Eight Create’s 2023 Cultural Assessment Report and especially through the collectively written response, “Renewing our Vows: Reflecting on a Year of Cultural Assessment Conversations.” This is a moment when CWPA needs stories–stories to help us understand who WPAs are right now and how CWPA can fulfill our organizational mission to support them. At the conference, we call on members new and old to share narratives of success, ambiguity, and failure regarding not just labor exploitation, but all aspects of WPA-related work, from curriculum design to hiring practices, from programmatic assessment to navigating bureaucratic systems to systemic discrimination.
CWPA's legacy as an organization has been invested in labor and literacy as central to administrative work. From its inception, CWPA has focused on the numerous issues facing writing program administrators while serving as a collective space for sharing resources, reflection, and creative problem-solving. To this end, labor remains a complex and vital topic within CWPA today, positioning the organization and its members always at the intersection of new administrative hurdles, constantly changing pedagogical tools and structures, and shifting forms of institutional resources that support both teaching and administration, or inversely create new challenges for them. This perspective requires us to address recent and emerging labor issues from a dynamic perspective about what we need WPAs to become in the near future and how CWPA can continue to support these administrators and educators in the midst of this change.
Additionally, for decades writing instructors have been navigating the idea of a literacy crisis, from our roles as WPAs we have been managing this perception through discussion, outcomes statements, assessment models, and other resources developed to ease our concern with the difficulty of the moment and to stabilize our foundational principles. And yet, as literacy continues to evolve, those foundational principles need to be stabilized/stabilized anew. From this perspective, we call on scholars to think both forward toward the future of WPA work and backward toward CWPA's legacy, recognizing the ongoing need for voices of intervention and spaces that protect, teach, and support literacy workers.
As Sheila Carter-Tod suggests, the field is moving toward more intersectional and diverse understandings of the WPA as an agent of change and problem-solving, especially during arduous times (100-102). Crisis is an element of life and social politics shaped by emerging circumstances of great difficulty and disruption. Within Black discourse and African American rhetoric, eloquence gains significance through the concept of "troubled eloquence," which describes a space where Black Americans process and address the crises that shape their lives. Eloquence is a fitting lens for describing this approach to difficulty given its relationship to language and care. We invite proposals that engage the material realities of administrators, coordinators, and teachers of writing—realities still shaped by embodied, virtual, and technical experiences with discrimination, equity, and complex social and institutional values, as well as a long history of trying to establish labor resolutions in Wyoming and beyond (Cox et al., 2014).
Below are questions to guide your thinking about the conference theme. This list is not exhaustive; we encourage you to think beyond what's provided in ways that build toward possibility and collective value.
- In what way has our labor been deeply impacted by changing and burgeoning Ed-Tech markets?
- In what ways do the decisions and partnerships of our institutions impact the definitions and resources allotted to writing programs, resources for writing, and perspectives on technology and writing?
- In what ways has writing teacher labor and assessment practices changed in recent years and how can we draw on our own history to address these changes and imagine sustainable futures?
- How do we expand our attention to address the full range of perspectives representing the various researchers, coordinators, and teachers within our field?
- How can we gather information about the way that labor conditions impact student learning?
- How do we cultivate a view of culture and social difference among administrators and coordinators that positions the range of difference as an essential component of discussions about labor, pedagogy, and assessment?
- How might we change the conversation about technology so that it highlights our expertise in asking useful questions and provide important insights about the various technologies that continue to shape how we define writing?
Proposal Types:
As we meet again in Laramie, we invite CWPA participants to multiple types of presentation proposals using innovative, interactive methods, including the following:
- 15-minute individual presentations: You may submit individual presentation proposals, which will be combined into a group of complementary presentations of 3-4 speakers to form a 75-minute session panel, with the last 30 minutes devoted to Q&A and audience discussion. We’ll put you in touch with one another in advance of the conference so you can develop a coherent panel.
- Full-panel session proposals: You may submit a panel proposal for 3-4 speakers designed to form a 75-minute session panel, with the last 30 minutes devoted to A&S and audience discussion. We encourage panel participants to alternate between traditional academic papers on writing program administration and personal storytelling narratives consistent with the spirit of the conference theme.
- Poster presentations: You may develop a poster presentation or creative artifact 9by yourself or with others to be displayed in the conference center atrium for view throughout the conference.
- Work-in-progress: We invite presenters to submit work at any stage of development regarding a research project, curriculum or assessment initiative, or faculty development undertaking. Presenters will have 15 minutes to deliver presentations followed by feedback from designated WPAs with related professional experience and work-in-progress audience participants.
The purpose of the annual CWPA Conference is to highlight the varied voices that are doing WPA work and have important insights to share. Your experiences and expertise are valued, and you are invited to be a part of our professional organization and larger scholarly and teaching community. We hope you will submit a proposal by midnight, Sunday, March 15, 2026 and share your expertise, stories, and experiences at our conference this July 23-25, 2026 at the University of Wyoming in Laramie!
More on the Conference Site and Beautiful Laramie, Wyoming
Coming soon . . .
Works Cited
Carter-Tod, Sheila. "Reflecting, Expanding, and Challenging: A Bibliographic Exploration of Race, Gender, Ability, Language Diversity, and Sexual Orientation and Writing Program Administration." WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 42, no. 3, 2019, pp. 97-105.
Cox, Anicca, et al. “The Indianapolis Resolution: Responding to Twenty-First-Century Exigencies/Political Economies of Composition Labor.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 68, no. 1, 2016, pp. 38–67, https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc201628754.
Council of Writing Program Administrators. “Renewing our Vows: Reflecting on a Year of Cultural Assessment Conversations.” By Michelle Bachelor-Robinson, Jacob Babb, Kelly Blewett, Daryl Lynn Dance, Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison, Erin Lehman, Patti Poblete, Mary Lourdes Silva, and Darci Thoune. https://wpacouncil.org/aws/CWPA/ asset_manager/get_file/927685?ver=5
McDonald, James C., and Eileen E. Schell. “The Spirit and Influence of the Wyoming Resolution: Looking Back to Look Forward.” College English, vol. 73, no. 4, 2011, pp. 360–78, https://doi.org/10.58680/ce201113514.
One Eight Create LLC. “2023 Council of Writing Program Administrators Cultural Assessment Report.” https://wpacouncil.org/aws/CWPA/asset_manager/get_file/902726?ver=1
Robertson, Linda R., Sharon Crowley, and Frank Lentricchia. “The Wyoming Conference Resolution Opposing Unfair Salaries and Working Conditions for Post-Secondary Teachers of Writing.” College English, vol. 49, no. 3, 1987, pp. 274–80, https://doi.org/10.2307/377922.
Trimbur, John and Barbara Cambridge. “The Wyoming Conference Resolution: A Beginning.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 12, no. 1-2, 1988, pp. 13-18.
On Behalf of CWPA
First draft submitted by Kelly Kinney, University of Wyoming, with contributions from CWPA Executive Board Members Kelly Blewett, David Green, Callie Kostelich, Erin Lehman, and Amanda Presswood.
[1] We are guided by the participants in the 1986 Wyoming Conference as well as the wisdom evoked in the Indianapolis Resolution, a reinvigorated version of the original Wyoming Resolution that took shape following the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Indianapolis. You can read about the new resolution’s inception in Anica Cox, Timothy Dougherty, Seth Kahn, Michelle LaFrance, and Amy Lynch-Biniek’s insightful 2016 CCC article “The Indianapolis Resolution: Responding to Twenty-First-Century Exigencies/Political Economies of Labor.”
For Inquiries
If you have any questions, please contact one of the following members of the Executive Board:
For registration issues or website issues, contact Amanda Presswood, CWPA Secretary: cwpasecretary@gmail.com
For scholarship inquiries or any other general queries about the conference or CWPA, contact Kelly Blewett, CWPA President: councilofWPA@gmail.com
