Connecting Writing Centers Across Borders is a hub for all things writing centers: news digests, announcements, interviews, and feature articles with directors and tutors, all with a focus on writing centers worldwide. Muriel “Mickey” Harris founded the blog in 2012 as an open forum for writing center folks to connect, ask questions, and support one another. Since then, the blog has passed through several editors and phases, much as the writing center field itself has grown and changed. Previous lead editors include Josh Ambrose (2015), Brian Hotson (2017), Anna Habib (2019), and Esther R. Namubiru (2025). In July 2020, Weijia Li joined as the blog’s first Production Editor and updated its design and interface. Today, the blog keeps its global focus under Lead Editor Inas Mahfouz, working with two regional editors: Maria Eleftheriou (Middle East) and Svetlana Suchkova (Europe). We welcome contributions from writing centers everywhere.
Anna Sophia Habib, Consulting Editor
I’m the Associate Director of Composition for Multilingual Writers at George Mason University. I also serve as the English department liaison to Mason’s branch campus in Songdo, South Korea & to INTO Mason’s graduate and undergraduate pathway programs for international students provisionally-admitted to Mason.
I received a BA in English with a concentration in Cultural Studies, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from George Mason University. My MFA thesis, which I hope to continue working on someday, is titled “A Block from Bliss Street: Growing up as a child of the Lebanese civil war.” I am currently working on a transrhetorical dissertation project that aims to explore and theorize the impact of individual experiences of trauma and displacement on translingual identities and languaging practices.
I served as the Associate Director of the Mason Writing Center for five years until I transitioned to my current position as Associate Director of Composition for Multilingual Writers. My research and publications have focused on the experiences of multilingual writers adapting to the expectations of the U.S. academy, faculty perceptions of writing by multilingual students, and designing writing courses that are attuned to the diverse needs of linguistically-diverse populations.
Inas Mahfouz, Lead Editor
I am an associate professor and chair of the English Department at the American University of Kuwait (AUK), where I teach a range of language and academic writing courses. I began teaching academic writing in Egypt in 2003, working with students who did not speak English at home. Most had started learning English early in life, yet academic writing remained a challenge for them. During my MA and PhD research in corpus linguistics, I came to see a text as a set of choices woven together to make meaning. Applying this idea of choice to second language writing helps show what my students struggle with.
When I joined AUK in 2010, I saw how much visiting the writing center helped my students produce stronger papers. This led me to look more closely at the role writing centers can play in supporting multilingual writers. Since then, I have regularly held workshops at our center and required students to visit it at least once while working on a major assignment.
My current research projects include (1) a cross-cultural study of metadiscourse markers in academic writing, which I began during my fellowship at the Dartmouth College Writing Center in summer 2017, and (2) the Arab Learner English Corpus (ALEC), a corpus of first-year writing hosted by the Learner Corpus Association.
I am especially interested in multilingualism in writing centers and the languages used during tutoring sessions. At AUK, English is the medium of instruction but not the language most of our students speak at home, so multilingualism is part of their everyday academic life.
Maria Eleftheriou (Regional Editor, Middle East)
I did not expect writing center work to become such an important part of my professional life when I first came to the American University of Sharjah in 2003. I had only recently graduated in education and was just beginning my academic career. Almost as soon as I arrived, I was given responsibility for a Writing Center that, at the time, functioned much like a laundry service: students slipped their papers under the door to be corrected and collected them later in the day. I knew very little about writing center theory or practice, but the idea of simply correcting papers rather than talking with the students who wrote them seemed counterintuitive, so I began reading the scholarship.
The more I learned, the more I began to imagine a Writing Center built around collaboration and process, not just correction. I developed a peer tutoring program and recruited, trained, and mentored tutors. Today, our Center includes a staff of 30 undergraduate and graduate tutors, as well as a Writing Fellows Program that brings peer writing support into university courses in all disciplines. That early shift in how I understood writing center work eventually led me to make peer tutoring the focus of my doctoral dissertation, and it continues to shape my work today.
Now an Associate Professor of English in the English Department at AUS and Director of the Writing Center, I teach undergraduate writing courses and courses in our MA TESOL program. But much of the work that has shaped me professionally has happened in the Writing Center itself. I have watched tutors grow in confidence, develop new skills, discover abilities they did not know they had, find new professional interests, and even change the direction of their lives because of their experiences as tutors. I have also seen the students they work with become more confident through conversations about their writing rather than simply receiving corrections. Those transformations, both in tutors and in the writers they support, are among the reasons writing center work matters so much to me.
Working in the Middle East has also shaped the questions I ask as a researcher. A lot of writing center scholarship has emerged from North American contexts, and those perspectives do not always capture the linguistic and cultural realities of our work here. This has drawn me to research grounded in our own context, including multilingual writing, peer tutoring, tutor development, and, these days, how generative AI is reshaping the field.
I am excited to join the WLN Blog as a Regional Editor and look forward to bringing greater visibility to work across the region. I also hope to create space for the experiences and challenges that emerge from our contexts, especially the voices of practitioners whose work may not always find its way into traditional academic publications but whose experiences have much to contribute to the wider writing center community.
Svetlana Suchkova (Regional Editor, Europe)
I am an associate professor, teacher trainer, and materials developer. Currently, I am the director of the Academic Writing Center at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia. I hold a PhD degree in philology. I authored and co-authored a number of EFL course books for Russian university students and researchers, among them English for Academics series (CUP, 2014, 2015) and How to write a research article (Nauka, 2020). I have participated at numerous national and international conferences with presentations and workshops. My areas of expertise are academic writing, writing for research and publication purposes, public speaking, and teacher training.
