Feeding Ourselves and Feeding Others: The Writing Innovation Symposium and Bedford/St. Martins Fellows Program

[guest_blogger]

By: Jenn Fishman and Darci Thoune

This post is part of a 2025 series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach founded in 2018. Learn more below from academic aunties—and WIS leadership—Darci Thoune and Jenn Fishman. Also look for posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”

The Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) ‘25 theme, Mise en Place, emerged—as many good ideas do—from a conversation we had not long after the 2023 WIS. As food obsessives and writers, we were drawn to how this concept works as not only a literal approach to getting things in place as we prepare to cook but also as a metaphor for how we get ourselves ready to write. What better way, we asked each other, to pull so many of the things we love into conversation? Also, like past symposium themes, from Connect! to Writing as ________, Mise en Place seemed like the kind of phrase that would bring people together in delicious ways for the 2025 symposium.

If we imagine each WIS as a two-day feast, with colleagues from across the country and around the world gathered together at a great table, two of our most beloved dining companions are colleagues from Macmillan, Laura Davidson and Joy Fisher Williams. Thanks to them, we are able to invite 3-6 early career colleagues to join WIS each year. Through our partnership with them, in 2022 we launched the Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows Program, which offers recipients mentorship and need-based financial support to attend the symposium as well as an opportunity to publish here in the Bits Blog.

Over 4 years, the program has grown and grown, and in 2025, we welcomed our largest cohort and our first undergraduate B/SM WIS Fellows. The roster includes:

Heather Martin, a teaching professor at the University of Denver who shared her WIS flashtalk, “Nourishing Belonging: Using Researcher Positionality Statements to Advance Student Wellbeing.”

Holly E. Burgess, a returning fellow and doctoral candidate at Marquette who teaches first-year writing and researches African American literature, hip hop studies, and social movements.

Jasmine Rodriguez, a Master's student at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) and Managing Editor and Senior Copy Editor of NEIU’s student newspaper, the Independent, who shared her WIS installation ‘“Mic Drop’ : A Collaborative Newsletter to Empower Incarcerated Students.”

Shannon Hautman, an instructor at the University of Cincinnati who shared her WIS flashtalk, “Texts on Campus: Composing with Maps.”

Sonakshi Srivastava , a returning fellow and writing tutor at Ashoka University in Sonepat, India, who shared her WIS flashtalk, “Spread the Deck: On Intuitive Writing.”

Raegan Gronseth, a recent graduate of Marquette University who studied writing-intensive English as well as anthropology and theology, who is currently co-writing a novel with Marshall Kopacki.

Marshall Kopacki, an MFA Fiction student at the University of Colorado at Boulder and recent graduate of Marquette University with a B.A. in Writing-Intensive English and Theology who is currently co-writing a novel with Raegan Gronseth.

This group attended WIS ‘25 both onsite and online, and they made vital contributions as writers, scholars, teachers, and colleagues. Before, during, and after the symposium, they were mentored by members of the 2025 WIS Steering Committee, including Gitte Frandsen, Jenna Green, Jessie Wirkus Haynes, Max Gray, and Nora Boxer.

One of our goals with each WIS is to invite as many people as possible to join us at the proverbial table, where conversation flows, and ideas change as they are exchanged, and our goals as writers and writing educators become that much more possible to achieve. The Macmillan-WIS partnership enables us to turn aspirations into realities, as blog posts by this year’s B/SM WIS Fellows show. Bits contributions by Heather Martin, Jasmine Rodriguez, Sonakshi Srivastava, Shannon Hautman, Marshall Kopacki and Raegan Gronseth set the table for conversations that extend from the kitchen and the classroom to the community and beyond.

We invite you to follow the tags for WIS and writing innovation, where you’ll find additional insights from past B/SM WIS Fellows and others. Through 10/24, which is the application due date, we invite colleagues to learn about the 2026 fellows opportunity. We also invite readers from near and far to watch the symposium website for information about how to attend WIS ‘26 either online or onsite January 29th and 30th. As in years past, the program simmers with opportunities, and however you are able to join us, we look forward to welcoming you in!

The theme for WIS ‘26, artifact, invites colleagues to connect writing, art, and facts. Special features include a makerspace, an Artifact Exchange, and an opportunity to contribute to a scholarly publication. Proposals as well as applications for Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows are due 10/24; undergraduate contributions are due 11/21. Registration opens in November, and the event itself takes place onsite and online January 29th and 30th, 2026.