ABSTRACT
Lynn Z. Bloom’s extensive body of scholarship investigates the values articulated in composition classrooms, the impact of the readings associated with teaching writing, and the history of advanced composition. She is the author of more than 80 articles and book chapters and more than 300 book reviews, poems, and works of creative nonfiction. In her exploration of the values of composition studies, Bloom consistently places the student at the center of the discipline’s mandate to create, critique, and inspire. In Fact and Artifact: Writing Nonfiction (1985) she engages students as aspiring writers learning the craft of the essay. To demonstrate that craft, Bloom edited The Essay Connection: Readings for Writers (2012). The comprehensive selection of essays from professional and student writers displays the range of rhetorical goals writers undertake, from interpreting images to fashioning reasoned arguments to setting an agenda for world peace. In The Essay Canon (1999), Bloom historicizes and contextualizes the teaching of composition through a rigorous examination of the essays that have appeared in composition readers since World War II. Bloom further hones the discipline’s definition with Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration (1998), a collection of essays examining the interplay of writing, teaching writing, and ways of reading. The collection asserts that these activities develop a creative space for students and instructors that is unique to the study of composition.
