Wendy R. Williams

Wendy R. Williams is an associate professor of English at Arizona State University, where she researches secondary writing instruction, visual and multimodal narratives, and out-of-school learning spaces for youth writers. She is the founding director of ASU’s Young Authors’ Studio, a free youth writing program that operated at the university’s Polytechnic campus from 2017 to 2023, engaging students in grades 5–12 and providing college students with project-based mentoring experiences. Prior to her university appointment, she taught English at the middle and high school levels for nine years.

Williams is the author of Mentoring Youth Writers: Six Strategies to Bring Out the Author in Every Student (National Council of Teachers of English, 2025), which grows out of an in-depth qualitative case study of the Young Authors’ Studio and identifies six mentoring strategies to support adolescent writers. She also wrote Listen to the Poet: Writing, Performance, and Community in Youth Spoken Word Poetry (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018). Her scholarship on youth writing and literacy has appeared in journals such as Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Journal of Visual Literacy, English Journal, English Teaching: Practice and Critique, Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (English), and *Pedagogies