July 29, 2026
The CCCC Creative Nonfiction Standing Group condemns the NCTE Executive Committee for its irresponsible dissolution of CCCC, a short-sighted act that not only repudiates 75 years of intellectual history but also disenfranchises thousands of college writing teachers and hundreds of thousands of their students.
Beyond serving as an intellectual, practical, and ethical center for understanding and teaching writing, as well as the center for the entire field of writing studies, CCCC has served as a welcoming tent for dozens of special interest groups/standing groups and areas of specializations, including ours.
NCTE’s actions force us to seek our future outside NCTE, an organization that has betrayed us by abruptly dissolving the professional organization that has been instrumental to so many of us. We will not be joining NCTE’s College Section as suggested by NCTE leadership.
The Creative Nonfiction Special Interest/Standing Group has been an integral part of the CCCC community since its first meeting at the 2000 annual conference in Minneapolis, buoyed not only by stalwarts in the field but also by graduate students and junior faculty and emerging scholars who straddle the worlds of creative nonfiction and rhetoric and composition.
We have also served as an academic home for those seeking mentorship, innovative pedagogies, scholarship, and a community that is not replicated elsewhere (not at AWP and not at NCTE’s own College Section.)
We originated and have run the Donald Murray Prize contest in conjunction with Writing on the Edge since 2002, and a creative nonfiction writing workshop at the CCCC annual conference since 2009, providing attendees with a chance to write what they teach, invigorate their pedagogy, and connect with a like-minded creative writing community.
We vow to keep that community going outside of NCTE.
CCCC CNF Standing Group Executive Committee
Heather Fester, Jenny Spinner, Christy Zink, Pamela Baker, and Doug Hesse (emeritus)
To join us, send an email to
cccc_cnf@googlegroups.com