Marcia Curtis, former Deputy and Director of the UMass Writing Program, passed away on September 26, 2023 from pulmonary fibrosis. Marcia received her MA/PhD from UMass in 1978 in literary criticism and soon joined the Writing Program as a teacher and administrator. Along with the Writing Program Director Charles Moran and other members of the administrative team, Marcia worked to transition the Rhetoric Program to the Writing Program that exists today. Marcia went on to become the Deputy Director, and Director of the Program. Curtis left the Writing Program in 2003, to direct the Dean’s Book Course for the Commonwealth Honors College until her retirement from UMass in 2012.
Marcia will be remembered as a scholar, teacher, administrator, and mentor whose focus was always on undergraduate education. For Marcia our undergraduate students were the center of her work. Marcia’s research advanced writing studies scholarship. She published in the areas of basic writing, computers and writing and research issues for studying computer classroom pedagogy. Collaborating with Anne Herrington, Marcia published Persons in Process: Four Stories of Writing and Professional Development in College (2000) a longitudinal study that followed four UMass undergraduates writing experience from Englwrit 111 throughout their college experience. For their work, Curtis and Herrington received the David H. Russell Prize for Research in Teaching by NCTE.
As a teacher Marcia was patient and a careful and kind responder. She always made sure her students’ ideas were heard. She consistently worked to develop resources to enable students to develop and gain confidence in their writing, reading, and critical thinking skills. Marcia developed the curriculum for the Englwrit 111 course focusing on the connection between reading and writing. In order to recognize her contributions in April 2023, the Englwrit 111 Best Text Contest has been named in her honor.
As an administrator and mentor Curtis focused on the interrelationship between the Writing Program’s first-year students and the graduate students who taught them. Marcia worked to develop resources that would enable graduate teachers to provide the best possible writing instruction to the first-year students and was a tireless mentor to enable graduate instructors to become the best teachers they could be. This led her to mentor a group of graduate students to develop the first and subsequent editions for the Englwrit 111 course reader Composition of Our “selves" (1994). With the introduction of more published texts into the Englwrit 112 curriculum, Marcia mentored a group of graduate students to develop The Original Text-Wrestling Book (2001) the first reader for College Writing. Very early on Marcia also recognized the importance the emerging field of technology would play in the teaching of writing. She developed the first computer classrooms for Englwrit 111 and Englwrit 112 as well as mentored graduate teachers to learn how to teach within what was then a non-traditional classroom.
For those of us who knew and worked with Marcia, she will be remembered for tireless energy, her wit and sense of humor. Our days in Bartlett Hall were filled with teacher talk and a lot of laughter. She is missed.