Congratulations to Assistant Professor Dr. J. Logan Smilges (they/them) on winning one of two 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Lavender Rhetorics Awards for Excellence in Queer Scholarship. Dr. Smilge’s first monograph, Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (University of Minnesota Press 2022), is being recognized for making queer interventions into the study of composition and rhetoric with a high level of originality, affective impact, and pedagogical and theoretical contributions to the field.
“Smilges’ argument about the expansive, community-building, life-affirming, death-defying potential of silence was, at times, mind-bogglingly brilliant, as was their exploration of the estrangement of queer studies and disability studies,” writes a CCCC committee member.
Led by commitments to transfeminism and disability justice, J. Logan Smilges writes and teaches at the nexus of queer/trans disability studies, the history of medicine, and rhetorical studies. They are the author of Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (2022) and Crip Negativity (2023). Their work has appeared in a number of journals and edited collections including Transgender Studies Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, and the Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric.
Dr. Smilges will be announced as an Award recipient during the CCCC Annual Convention in April 2024. Queer Silence is being recognized alongside Failing Sideways: Queer Possibilities for Writing Assessment (University Press of Colorado 2023) by Stephanie West-Puckett, Nicole I. Caswell, and William P. Banks.
