WILLA v12 - From The Editors

FROM THE EDITORS

As your new WILLA editors, Hannah and I would like to thank the WILLA Editorial Board for their help in making this transition move smoothly with their support at summer meeting. A special thanks goes to Lee Williams who shared from her experiences and volunteered to answer any questions we might have as we pursued this endeavor. Our thanks also go to the authors herein who have submitted their work for review and patiently waited for feedback and revisions as we all shared the tumultuously busy fall season in each of our lives. (It's interesting that in academia one can always predict that fall is a tumultuous season).

The journal articles in this issue are framed within the pages of two poems by Marcy Rayher. One is a poem of beginning and the other is a poem of completion. Within the articles you will find the issues of women and girls in the world of literacy. Gina DeBlase writes about how girls both find themselves reflected in the literature they read and construct gender identities based on their reading. Kelley Dickerson Barnhardt and Elaine J. O'Quinn explore the potential benefits of journal writing for girls in the secondary English classroom. Janice Wolff shares her experiences teaching "Oprah books," those books promoted by Oprah Winfrey as a part of her book club. In all of these articles, we see the interactions between teachers and their students, and between students and the texts they read and write.

In the regular department columns, our chair, Mary Harmon, introduces our Guidelines for Gender-Fair Use of Language, written by WILLA members, are available on NCTE's website http://www.ncte.org/pubs/publish/books/107647.htm and we read the happenings of our high school, college, and retirement representatives. Due to changes in representative positions, there are no elementary or middle school columns in this issue. We look forward to the return of these columns in the next issue.

Editor:
Rose Casement
University of Michigan-Flint

Associate Editor:
Hannah Furrow
Indiana University of Pennsylvania