M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Texas A&M University

M. Jimmie Killingsworth, a native of South Carolina, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee in 1979 and has taught rhetoric, technical communication, and American literature at four universities. Currently director of writing programs and professor of English at Texas A&M, he is the author or co-author of seven books and over fifty scholarly articles and chapters, including the 1992 works Signs, Genres, and Communities in Technical Communication (with Michael Gilbertson) and Ecospeak:  Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (with Jacqueline S. Palmer, named Best Book of the Year in Scientific and Technical Communication by NCTE). Lately he has been working to join the two strands of his scholarly interests in environmental rhetoric and American literary culture in such works as Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics (named by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Selection for 2004) and Appeals in Modern Rhetoric: An Ordinary-Language Approach (2005), which extends his interest in body politics from the earlier study Walt Whitman's Poetry of the Body (1989) to the study of the rhetoric of place. Most recently, he has been exploring the conceptual and rhetorical links among the different representations of natural, artificial, and virtual places.

David Kirkland, New York University

David Kirkland is assistant professor of English education at New York University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in digital media and composition, African American rhetorics, and urban adolescent literacies. He writes extensively about the roles of African American Language (AAL), new technologies, and digital media in the literate lives of urban youth. Currently, he is conducting a comprehensive study, entitled "Digital Underground," which examines the digital literacy practices of ten African American students in New York City, whose frequent participation in online communities (e.g., MySpace, CrushSpot, Tagged, Facebook) has been documented in the New York Times.

In addition to his most recent project, Dr. Kirkland has conducted two other projects on rhetorics and technologies. In 2000, he collaborated with Geneva Smitherman and Austin Jackson on a research project funded by the Spencer Foundation, which examined the rhetorical content of Web sites written in or commenting upon AAL. The results of this study were presented at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Meeting in 2000 and were published in the American Language Review in 2001. He has also conducted an award-winning three-year, ethnographic study funded by the American Educational Research Association, which examined six urban adolescent African American males' use of personal computers to write and "publish" raps for public consumption.

Carolyn Miller, North Carolina State University

Carolyn R. Miller is SAS Institute Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication at North Carolina State University, where she has taught since 1973. She received her Ph.D. in communication and rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1980. She has published essays on digital rhetoric, rhetorical theory, the rhetoric of science and technology, and technical communication in journals such as Argumentation, College English, the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetorica, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly, as well as in many edited volumes. 

She has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Written Communication, and in 2008 she will become editor of Rhetoric Society Quarterly for a four-year term. She is a past president of the Rhetoric Society of America, a Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, and received the SIGDOC Rigo award for lifetime contributions in 2006.

At North Carolina State, Dr. Miller teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetoric and technical writing. She is founding director of the doctoral program in communication, rhetoric, and digital media, established in 2004, and was founding director of the master's program in technical communication, established in 1988. She has been a member of the university's Academy of Outstanding Teachers since 1984 and in 1999 was named Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor. 

James Porter, Michigan State University

James E. Porter (Ph.D., University of Detroit, 1982) is a professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University, where he also serves as co-director of the WIDE Research Center (Writing in Digital Environments). Since arriving at Michigan State University in 2001, he has provided leadership in developing three new degree programs in writing (at the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. levels) and promoting an overall University Writing Initiative designed to expand and improve writing instruction in the undergraduate curriculum.

Porter's books include Audience and Rhetoric (Prentice Hall, 1992), Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing (Ablex, 1998), and, co-authored with Patricia Sullivan, Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices (Ablex, 1997). With Patricia Sullivan and Johndan Johnson-Eilola, he has co-authored an online, Web-based textbook—Professional Writing Online (Longman, 2nd edition, 2003). Recent articles of his have appeared in the journals Kairos, Computers & Composition, College Composition and Communication, and Works and Days. His co-authored article "Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change" won the Braddock Award for best article in College Composition and Communication in 2000.

Porter's current research focuses on digital rhetoric—that is, the art of writing and communicating with/within computer-networked environments, particularly within technical/professional writing contexts. He has publications forthcoming on digital communication ethics; digital writing research methodology; the economics of digital delivery and distribution; and the impact of copying, downloading, and filesharing on writers' notions of intellectual property and authorship and on their composing processes. He is currently working on a book with Heidi McKee examining methodological and ethical issues in conducting digital writing research.

Geoffrey Sirc, University of Minnesota

Geoffrey Sirc works in composition in the English Department at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of English Composition as a Happening (Utah State University Press, 2004) and the co-author of Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition (Utah State University Press, 2002). His teaching and research interests include composition theory and pedagogy, literacy technologies, visual arts and art history, hip hop, and the modernist era.

Anne Wysocki, Michigan Technological University

Anne Frances Wysocki is associate professor of visual and digital communication at Michigan Technological University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in visual and verbal composition, visual rhetoric, and new media; she is also director of the writing programs and of Graduate Teaching Instructor Education. She is lead author of Writing New Media: Theory and applications for expanding the teaching of composition, which won the Computers and Writing Distinguished Book Award, and her compositions have appeared in Computers and Composition, Kairos, and the Journal of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, as well as in many books; with Dennis Lynch she has published Compose/Design/Advocate: A Rhetoric for Integrating Written, Visual, and Oral Communication. She has designed and produced software to help undergraduates learn 3D visualization and to introduce them to geology. Her interactive new media pieces "A Bookling Monument" and "Leaved Life" have won, respectively, the Kairos Best Webtext award and the Institute for the Future of the Book's Born Digital Competition.