Brandon M. Erby, assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies in the UK College of Arts and Sciences, has won the 2024 CCCC Richard Braddock Awards for “Imagining Freedom: Cultural Rhetorics, Digital Literacies and Podcasting in Prison,” published in the September 2023 issue of College Composition and Communication. The Conference on College Composition and Communication is an association within the National Council of Teachers of English. 

This award is presented to the author of the outstanding article on writing or the teaching of writing in the journal during the year before the conference's annual convention. The award was created to honor the memory of Richard Braddock from the University of Iowa, an extraordinary person and teacher who touched the lives of many people.

Erby’s article asks readers to resist the dominant discourses that regularly dehumanize incarcerated individuals. Instead, he urges readers to attend to these individuals’ voices, identities and humanity to consider the ways incarcerated individuals create knowledge and artistic texts and to recognize the innovative ways they use and sponsor complex literacies. 

Erby weaves together scholarship from the interdisciplinary fields of carceral studies, cultural rhetorics, literacy studies and digital composition as he examines case studies of rhetorical action being produced inside prisons and then circulating outside those prisons’ walls. Erby’s article contributes to the field of rhetoric and composition, illuminating an underexamined area of rhetorical activity and revealing the important rhetorical and cultural work being done there. It also showcases how individuals use literacy and rhetoric to build forms of freedom in oppressive contexts. 

Erby will be announced as a recipient of the Richard Braddock Award at the conference's awards presentation on Friday, April 5, during the 2024 Annual Convention in Spokane, Wash. 

For more information about the CCCC Richard Braddock Award, including past winners, see http://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/awards/braddock.   

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The Conference on College Composition and Communication, which has more than 4,000 members and subscribers, supports and promotes the teaching and study of composition, rhetoric, and communication skills at the college level, both in undergraduate and graduate programs. College Composition and Communication is the group’s journal. For more information, visit http://cccc.ncte.org/. 

The National Council of Teachers of English, with more than 25,000 individual and institutional members worldwide, is dedicated to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education. For more information, please visit http://www2.ncte.org/.