ABSTRACT
Jacqueline Jones Royster is currently Senior Vice Provost and Executive Dean of the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences, and Professor of English at the Ohio State University. Prior to her move to Ohio State in 1992, Royster taught English and served as an administrator at Spelman College, an historically African American college that is her alma mater. From 1976 to 1992, she held several positions there, including Director of the Comprehensive Writing Program and Associate Dean for Advising. While she has written on literacy and the teaching of writing, Royster is best known for her work on African American women writers and Afra-feminist research methods. From 1983 to 1996, she was part of the editorial collective of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women (serving as editor of their final issue, published in 1996). With the editorial collective, she published the anthology Double Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters in 1991. Perhaps her best-known work in this area is Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women, which won the MLA’s Mina P. Shaughnessy Award for best book in the teaching of English. Royster was Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (in 1995); her chair’s address, “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own” is frequently cited and was anthologized in Cross Talk in Composition Theory: A Reader (second edition, 2003). Her scholarship, leadership, and service to others has led to many awards, including Ohio Pioneer in Education by the State of Ohio Department of Education (2000); the Ohio State University Distinguished Diversity Award (2002); the Ohio State University Distinguished Lecturer (2003); YWCA Woman of Achievement Award (2004) for the City of Columbus; and the Exemplar Award (2004) from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
