Meet the current Officers of the OWCA Executive Board. You can contact the Board at board@onlinewritingcenters.org.
Megan Boeshart Burelle, President
Length of term: January 2023 to December 2024, followed by 1-year term as Immediate Past President
Megan Boeshart Burelle is the President of the OWCA. She currently directs the Old Dominion University Writing Center. She began working in writing centers as an undergraduate writing consultant at Ohio State University-Newark in 2010. She is currently working on her PhD in English and working on a dissertation about tutor training for asynchronous screencast tutoring. Her research interests include online tutoring, tutor training, and graduate writing support.
Oluwayinka Arawomo, Vice President
Length of term: July 2023 to December 2024
Oluwayinka Arawomo is the Vice President of the OWCA. She is the past TA assistant director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center. She is currently a 6th year PhD candidate in the Department of English (Composition and Rhetoric program) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has taught first year composition for four years and supported her students in the writing classroom and one-to-one tutoring in the writing center. Her research interests include online writing support groups for female graduate students, digital writing and rhetoric, Nigerian women’s discourses in digital spaces, and African Feminism.
Jaclyn Henegar, Secretary
Length of term: January 2023 to December 2024
Jaclyn Henegar is the current Assistant Treasurer of the OWCA. She began working in writing centers as an undergraduate tutor in 2015, and worked as a graduate assistant writing center tutor at the Old Dominion University (ODU) Writing Center from 2018-2020. She is currently working on her PhD in English at ODU, studying both Native American and Indigenous literatures and cultural studies, and writing center rhetoric and composition. Her current research interests include Native feminisms, community writing centers, and counterstory composition in the freshman writing classroom.
Vacant, Assistant Secretary
Length of term: 1 year, followed by 1-year term as Secretary
Elle Tyson, Founding Treasurer
Length of term: October 2020 to December 2024
Elle Tyson became a Coordinator for the Online Writing Centers Community in 2020 and is now an Incorporator and Founding Treasurer of OWCA. She worked as both a graduate assistant tutor and a professional tutor while earning an MA in applied linguistics with an emphasis in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) at Old Dominion University (ODU). She is working on a PhD in English and is the Assistant Director for ePortfolio & Digital Initiatives at ODU, overseeing the daily operations and tutor training for a digital composition tutoring center, ODU’s ePortfolio Studio. Her current research focuses on best practices for online tutoring, specifically asynchronous video/screencast feedback. She is also interested in exploring XR for tutor training.
John Sinclair, Assistant Treasurer
Length of term: January 2024 to December 2024, followed by 1-year term as Treasurer
Meet Dr. John Sinclair, or ‘Dr. John’ as he’s warmly referred to. In addition to his roles at the OWCA, where he believes that all instructors should be equipped with the tools needed to help students succeed in writing, Dr. John is an active instructor for doctoral, MBA, business and research courses. Dr. John is also a published author, with a best-selling business book on Amazon, and a prolific writer who shares market insights through daily and weekly newsletters. Driven by a passion for cultivating confident and empowered writers, he channels his professional and teaching experience to support students in their writing endeavors. Drawing from his expertise, Dr. John is dedicated to guiding students on a transformative journey, helping them develop into successful and confident writers. He believes in the profound impact of effective support and mentorship, fostering an environment that empowers students to excel in their writing pursuits.”
Vacant, Diversity & Social Justice Chair
Length of term: 1 year, followed by 1 year as Diversity & Social Justice Chair
Pallavi Mittra, Diversity & Social Justice Co-Chair
Length of term: January 2024 to December 2025, followed by 2-years as Diversity & Social Justice Chair
Pallavi is an Academic Coach at the Academic Success Center at National University. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Calcutta (India), a M.S. in Management, a M.Res. in Research Methodology, and a Ph.D. in Organization Behavior from the University of Strathclyde (U.K.). Pallavi has presented her research at several international conferences and received a best paper award from the British Academy of Management. For the past 12 years, she has taught undergraduate students and taken an inquiry-based approach to coaching school students in writing skills, and extensively developed multimodal learning content across diverse topics for varied audiences. In her current role, she assists unconventional learners pursuing graduate studies to understand the intricacies of academic writing and find their unique critical voice as scholars-in-making.
Madelyn Carroll, Accessibility Chair
Length of term: January 2023 to December 2023
Madelyn Carroll (she/her) is the Chair of the Accessibility Committee. She taught Freshman English and worked as a tutor and tutor coordinator at Rowan University, where she also got her BA and MA in Writing. She is currently working towards her PhD in Composition and Applied Linguistics at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she also currently tutors in the Jones White Writing Center, is a graduate assistant with the Writing Across the Curriculum program, and severs as the Social Events Coordinator for the Composition and TESOL Association. Her research focuses on equity in the composition classroom and the writing center.
Vacant, Accessibility Co-Chair
Length of term: 1 year, followed by 1-year as Accessibility Chair
Rasha Alkhateeb, Student Representative
Length of term: January 2024 to December 2024 (term can be renewed)
Rasha Alkhateeb (she/her) is a PhD student in Literacy Education and a Writing Fellow in The Graduate School Writing Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is an Executive Committee Member of the South Central Writing Center Association’s Tutor Talks, a series of virtual professional development sessions hosted by tutors for tutors. Her research interests are in liberation literacies or how students with racialized, politicized, and criminalized identities use writing as a form of schooling resistance. Rasha is a poet and loves recommending books in all genres!
Jarrett Taylor, Student Representative
Length of term: January 2024 to December 2024 (term can be renewed)
Being a student representative for the Online Writing Centers Association allows Jarrett to not only apply his tutoring experience to various issues but his technical experience as well. Technology can be found and applied in any capacity for tutoring. Smart boards, smartphones, and web cameras are just some of the devices that are being used in tutoring sessions. What’s more, online tutoring has significantly increased compared to ten years ago. As a tutor and lab technician, it is vital to keep up with the latest and upcoming technology and note how it will affect the duties of tutors. Technology such as the use of Chat GPT will affect how tutors approach a student’s work. The tutor may not only have to worry about the quality of the paper, (s)he would be concerned about the originality of the piece. That is why as a tutor and lab technician, Jarrett needs to learn more about how to deal with such issues. Technology should be a tool for tutoring, not its replacement.
Spencer Harrison, Conference Co-Chair
Length of term: June 2024 to June 2025
Spencer Harrison is the Conference Co-Chair of the OWCA. For the 2023-2024 academic year, Spencer is serving as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Kazakhstan. From 2019-2020, he taught American literature and composition at Boricua College. Spencer served, from 2017-2019 as a New York City teaching fellow and received an MS in Secondary Mathematics Education from St. John’s University. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, he taught first year composition, worked in the Writing Center, and received an MA in English with a focus on creative writing. At Pitzer College, Spencer received a BA in English and is where he first started working as a peer writing tutor. Spencer has presented at the IWCA, EWCA, MENAWCA, IWCA Collaborative, and CCCC conferences. He also participated in the EWCA’s 2023 Summer Institute in Armenia. Spencer’s research interests include internationalizing the Writing Center, multimodal composition, translingualism, code-meshing, synthesizing national academic composition traditions, and working in international and multilingual contexts.
Jennifer Torres, Conference Co-Chair
Length of term: June 2024 to June 2025, followed by 1-year term as Conference Chair
Jennifer (Jenny) Torres is the OWCA 2025 Conference Co-Chair. Jenny is currently a third year PhD Rhetoric and Composition student at the University of Illinois Chicago. She primarily teaches in the first year writing program and is a supervisor at the UIC Writing Center. Her research interests focus on methods of argumentation stemming from the sophistic practice of antilogic from Ancient Greece. She’s currently a teaching assistant for UIC’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence and assists in designing, promoting, and facilitating training workshops and webinars on teaching strategies and techniques for UIC instructors. Jenny received her Bachelor’s degree in English and Psychology and her Master’s degree in English with a focus on Rhetoric and Composition, both from UIC.
Bri Lafond, Virtual Events Chair
Length of term: January 2023 to December 2024
Bri Lafond (she/her) is the Virtual Events Co-Chair of the OWCA. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she is affiliated with the Center for Writing Studies and the campus writing center, the Writers Workshop. Her research interests include online writing centers, social media platforms, video essays, and multimodality.
Elizabeth Taylor, Virtual Events Co-Chair
Length of term: June 2024 to December 2024, followed by 1-year term as Virtual Events Chair
Dr. Taylor is the Director of Academic Success and Assistant History Professor at Miles College, a HBCU located within the Birmingham metropolitan area. In this position she oversees the Center for Teaching and Learning, Academic Recovery Program. Early Alert Program, Peer Tutoring and Academic Support Services across campus. She was previously employed at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA as the Supplemental Instruction Coordinator, where she also received her doctorate in History. Courses she currently teaches at Miles College include Early Modern Europe, Modern Europe, European Nationalism, History of Violence and World Civilization I and II. Her current research focuses on the retention of high-risk populations, with a particular focus on academic recovery and success at HBCUs.
Amanda Tomanek, Website Coordinator
Length of term: January 2024 to December 2025
Amanda Tomanek (she/they) is a website coordinator for the OWCA. She began working as a student assistant in an ESL computer lab on her undergraduate campus, where her love for peer tutoring began. Amanda received a master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from Teachers College, Columbia University, and spent nearly 5 years teaching EFL and academic literacy at universities in Japan. After holding the position of Associate Director of Learning and Tutoring Services for Writing Support at California State University San Marcos, which has provided online writing support since fall 2019, she is currently an ESOL instructor in the Portland Community College system. Her research interests include equitable practices for multilingual, undocumented, and first-generation college students.
Daniel Scharf, Website Coordinator
Length of term: January 2023 to December 2024 (term can be renewed)
Daniel Scharf (he/him) is a website coordinator for the OWCA. He started his career in education teaching English for several years in Germany. He later obtained an MA in TESOL from Portland state University where he worked as an English tutor in the Intensive English Language Program (IELP) there. He has taught at several universities in Japan for several years where he was a co-founder of a peer writing center. Daniel is now the International Language & Education Center Program Manager at SUNY Oswego.
Joni Hayward Marcum, Grant Coordinator
Length of term: Two years
Dr. Joni Hayward Marcum is Coordinator of the UVU Writing Center and directs the Writing Fellows program. She is a multidisciplinary scholar with a background in media, cinema, and digital studies, English literature, writing programs, and writing centers. She has published scholarship in the film and film history disciplines and has taught writing, English, and film studies at Colorado State University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she earned her PhD in 2023. In addition to tutoring undergraduate and graduate students as a writing center tutor herself for six years, Joni has served on the Midwest Writing Centers Association board and mentored graduate students and student employees in first-year writing and writing centers. She has also presented writing center scholarship at the IWCA conference and NCPTW. Joni’s research interests include the intersections of writing and digital literacy, AI and writing, critical AI pedagogy, and research practices, information retrieval, and information organization.
Brian Harrell, Outreach Coordinator
Length of term: January 2023 to December 2024 (term can be renewed)
Brian Harrell is the Outreach Coordinator for OWCA and is the Writing Center Specialist at Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED). Brian established the NEOMED Writing Center as a campus initiatives pilot program in February of 2022. Brian is active in IWCA, NCTE, CCCC, and TYCA. Brian has worked in online education as a FYC instructor at several universities, including the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay where he currently teaches asynchronous composition and professional writing courses. Brian has worked in higher education since 2011. Brian is interested in asynchronous, online writing center work as it pertains to medical, pharmacy, and dental students and the high stakes writing they must complete for residency, as well as supporting graduate students in writing their theses and dissertations.