Masters of Text is a project from Ames Hawkins and Ryan Trauman meant to foster discussion of alternative textual forms of scholarship, and to promote scholarship about alternative modes of textuality. As much as possible, Masters of Text works to focus on fostering textuality and scholarship that combines intelligence, critique, creativity, and beauty. As Ames likes to say, we’re focused on the “critical-creative” approaches to scholarship. Feel free to checkout our bios below.

Ames Hawkins is a transgenre writer, educator, and art activist. An Associate Professor in the Department of English at Columbia College Chicago, she teaches courses in the Writing and Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and Literature Programs. Ames’s recent work makes contributions to the larger conversations regarding multimodal composing, art activism, collaboration, and queer literary nonfiction. Her creative-critical scholarship appears across a range of academic and literary publications—both print and online—such as, Computers and Composition Online, The Feminist Wire, Slag Glass City, and Water~Stone Review. She has a manifesto in the edited anthology, RAW: (Reading and Writing) New Media, and a co-authored piece in the collection, Resilience: Stories, Poems, Essays, Words for GLBT Teens. Ames served as contributor, curator, and co-editor of the Lambda Literary Foundations 25th Anniversary eBook Collection, 25 for 25: An Anthology of Works by 25 Outstanding Contemporary Authors and Those They Inspired. Ames also enjoys getting work off the page and onto the stage and has engaged in drag/queer/story performance in Chicago with Genderfusions, Northern Lights, and Second Story. What else? Ames’s sites of pleasure include walking, microbrewed beer/craft cocktail drinking, road-tripping, and thoughtful conversation. (@amesthehawk)(ames.hawkins(at)gmail(dot)com

Ryan Trauman is a full-time lecturer in the Columbia College Chicago English Department. His scholarship and creative non-fiction have appeared in Computers and Composition Online, Kairos, the North Dakota Quarterly, and he co-authored a chapter in Teaching with Student Texts (USUP, 2011). He is also co-editor of a recent collection of born-digital scholarship, The New Work of Composing, published this fall (CCDP, 2012). He facilitates workshops for the The Center for Digital Storytelling around the country. He taught for six summers at the Digital Media and Composition institute at Ohio State. Two of his video essays have been screened at the SSML Midwestern Film Festival, one of which was distributed by the Center for Digital Storytelling (2006). He is on the editorial boards of the Kairos Praxis Wiki as well as the Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects (The JUMP). He blogs sporadically at his informal, professional blog, New Media Scholar. (@trauman)(trauman(at)ryantrauman(dot)net)