Wendy Atkins-Sayre is Assistant Professor of Speech Communication and Director of the Speaking Center at the University of Southern Mississippi.  Her research interests center on identity as constructed through discourse, with an emphasis on social movement rhetoric and feminist criticism.  Her most recent publications are forthcoming in Western Journal of Communication (“Articulating Identity: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Animal/Human Divide”), an two edited volumes (Gender and Political Communication in America:  Rhetoric, Representation, and Display and  Arguments About Animal Ethics).  Her research has also appeared in Women & Language and her reviews have appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Women’s Studies in Speech Communication,and Southern Communication Journal. Her interest in speaking center and speech pedagogy developed while she served as editorial assistant for the journal Communication Education (2002-2005).  She also served as the Director of the Speaking Center at Agnes Scott College (2005-2007).  Atkins-Sayre earned her bachelor and master’s degrees in Speech Communication from Texas State University—San Marcos and her Ph.D. in Speech Communication from the University of Georgia.

Contact Information: Wendy.AtkinsSayre@usm.edu or 601.266.4370


Melanie Hendricks Barthelme is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Director of The Writing Center at the University of Southern Mississippi. She holds degrees from the University of Texas (B.A., Political Science), The Johns Hopkins University (M.A. Writing Seminars), and the University of Southern Mississippi (Ph.D., English), and has worked in political campaigns, advertising and public relations, and at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, before teaching at Johns Hopkins and Southern Miss. She has been directing The Writing Center since 2003, and for four years, until 2006, she also directed the Freshman Composition Program for the Department of English. She has published short stories, poems and essays in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Texas Observer, American Literary Review, Connecticut Review, Puerto del Sol, and other quarterlies and magazines, and won awards for both fiction and non-fiction prose, including a Transatlantic Review-Henfield Award and a Mississippi Arts Commission Individual Artists Fellowship.

Contact Information: mbarthelme.usmwritingcenter@gmail.com or 601.266.5495