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 arrived at the American University of Sharjah in 2003. Almost immediately, I was given responsibility for a Writing Center that functioned much like a laundry service: students slipped papers under the door to be corrected and collected them later. I knew little about writing center theory or practice, but correcting papers instead of talking with students seemed counterintuitive, so I began reading the scholarship.

That reading changed how I understood the work. I developed a peer tutoring program and began recruiting, training, and mentoring tutors. Today, the Center includes 30 undergraduate and graduate tutors and a Writing Fellows Program. That shift eventually led me to focus my doctoral dissertation on peer tutoring.

I am now an Associate Professor of English at AUS and Director of the Writing Center, teaching undergraduate writing courses and courses in our MA TESOL program. Much of the work that has shaped me professionally, however, has happened in the Writing Center. I have watched tutors discover new abilities and even change the direction of their lives, while the writers they support have grown more confident and developed as writers.

Working in the Middle East has also shaped my research. Most writing center scholarship has emerged from North American contexts and does not always reflect the linguistic and cultural realities of our work here. That gap has led me to conduct research grounded in our own context on multilingual writing, peer tutoring, tutor development, and, more recently, generative AI.

As a Regional Editor for the WLN Blog, I hope to increase visibility for writing center work across the Middle East and create space for practitioners whose experiences may not always appear in traditional academic publications.

Svetlana Suchkova (Regional Editor, Europe)