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Call for Applications: 2025 Intersectional Rhetorics Writing Retreat

Fully funded retreat will award book contract to participants • Retreat immediately follows 2025 RSA summer institute 

The Intersectional Rhetorics series, published by The Ohio State University Press, is taking applications for a new, fully funded writing retreat in beautiful Hocking Hills, Ohio, for rhetoricians with books in progress. This four-day retreat, which immediately follows the 2025 RSA Institute, will offer one-on-one manuscript feedback from series editor Karma R. Chávez and acquisitions editor Tara Cyphers; writing time and community; and an advance book contract. Lodging, meals, and a $500 travel stipend are included.

We welcome proposals for book projects in various stages of the writing process and from first-time and published authors alike.

Retreat Details:

  • Dates: Thursday, June 5–Sunday, June 8, 2025 (begins at the conclusion of the RSA 2025 Institute)
  • Location: Hocking Hills, OH (RSA attendees will be driven from Cincinnati to cabin in Hocking Hills; pickup at Columbus airport will be arranged for those not attending RSA)

How to Apply:

  • Due date: December 1, 2024
  • Awardee notification: February 1, 2025
  • Application requirements:  Book proposal (guidelines below), sample body chapter or published article related to book project, CV
  • Eligibility: Open to all scholars and prospective authors with a completed PhD or other terminal degree (such as an MFA). Edited collections will not be considered.

Selection Criteria:

  • Fit with the series (see About Intersectional Rhetorics)
  • Originality of contribution:  The series seeks cutting-edge rhetorical scholarship that forwards a new intervention for the field.
  • Development and rigor of the proposal: Does the proposal provide a robust description of the project, and does it meet our proposal guidelines? Is your overarching argument clear and your methodology well explained and fitting for the objects/cases under study? Are you engaging relevant scholarship and in an inclusive manner?
  • Quality of writing: Are the proposal and writing sample well written, with terms clearly defined and minimal jargon? Does your own voice (and argument) shine through? Is the project cohesive and the organization logical?

Your Proposal Should Include:

  • A general description or overview of the proposed book (central argument and contribution, methodology, scholarship informing the project)
  • A statement about the project's suitability for Intersectional Rhetorics
  • A table of contents, including a precis for each chapter that touches on case studies and shows the connection back to the driving argument
  • A timeline, including a projected date of completion for the full manuscript
  • A word count (including bibliography and notes)
  • A statement identifying previously published content
  • An analysis of the expected audience for the book
  • A round-up of competing books (if any exist), and a brief explanation of the uniqueness of the proposed book
  • See additional proposal guidance

Meet the Retreat Hosts

Tara Cyphers headshot

Tara Cyphers, Managing Editor and Assistant Director, The Ohio State University Press
cyphers.3@osu.edu
Tara Cyphers (she/her) acquires in rhetoric and communication studies, including for the New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality and Intersectional Rhetorics series. She is especially interested in projects that make important connections to pressing social, cultural, and political issues. Retreat applications should be emailed to Tara at the address above.

Karma R. Chávez headshot

Karma R. Chávez, Series Editor, Intersectional Rhetorics

Karma R. Chávez (she/her) is known as a key thinker on intersectional approaches in the field of rhetoric with a specific focus on women of color feminisms, queer theories, critical race theories, social movements, coalitional building, and immigration politics. She is the author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities and many articles and chapters. She is also coeditor of Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies (with Cindy L. Griffin), and Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (with Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen and Robert Glenn Howard).

About Intersectional Rhetorics:


Intersectional Rhetorics takes as its starting point the position that intersectionality offers important insights to the field of rhetoric—including that to enhance what we understand as rhetorical practice, we must diversify the types of rhetors, arguments, frameworks, and forms under analysis. It calls us to account for context by attending to power, identity, difference, and marginalization in addition to rhetoric’s traditional concerns with situation: exigence, rhetor biography, and situational constraints.

In order to advance rhetoric by diversifying its scholars and its scholarship, Intersectional Rhetorics will emphasize work that addresses the rhetorical practices of marginalized and nonnormative people; publish volumes that are explicitly intersectional, both in addressing multiple modalities of power and in working across multiple fields/disciplines; and seek out authors whose perspectives and standpoints differ from the majority of rhetoric scholars.

The series seeks to create an outlet for cutting-edge rhetorical scholarship and a visible, exciting new venue for up-and-coming, as well as established, scholars in the field. As such, books published in the series must meet the following parameters:

  • draw on intersectional scholarship, including that which utilizes rhetorical methods (broadly construed),
  • use at least two analytical lenses or attend to at least two intersecting/interlocking modalities of power,
  • align with and contribute to one or more academic discipline/field where rhetoric is featured, including but not limited to Communication Studies; Cultural Studies; Writing Studies; Disability Studies; Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; Ethnic and Indigenous Studies; Philosophy; Critical Literary and Media Studies; and American Studies.

Thus, the idea of intersection works on two levels for the series—(1) reflecting the series’ privileging of intersectional perspectives and analytical frames while also (2) emphasizing rhetoric’s intersection with related fields, disciplines, and research areas. 

Series Books:

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The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship between Women Teachers cover

The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship between Women Teachers

Pamela VanHaitsma

A Nation’s Undesirables: Mixed-Race Children and Whiteness in the Post-Nazi Era cover

A Nation’s Undesirables: Mixed-Race Children and Whiteness in the Post-Nazi Era

Tracey Owens Patton

Grassroots Activisms: Public Rhetorics in Localized Contexts cover

Grassroots Activisms: Public Rhetorics in Localized Contexts

Edited by Lisa L. Phillips, Sarah Warren-Riley, and Julie Collins Bates

Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption cover

Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption

Jennifer Lin LeMesurier

Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics cover

Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics

V. Jo Hsu

Winner, 2024 RSA Book Award • Winner, 2024 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award • Winner, 2023 NCA Diamond Anniversary Book Award

Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship cover

Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship

Shui-yin Sharon Yam

Winner, 2021 CCCC Outstanding Book Award

Culturally Speaking: The Rhetoric of Voice and Identity in a Mediated Culture cover

Culturally Speaking: The Rhetoric of Voice and Identity in a Mediated Culture

Amanda Nell Edgar

Winner, 2020 Outstanding Book Award, Critical/Cultural Studies Division of the National Communication Association • A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title