A recent article, “Black Linguistic Justice from Theory to Practice,” has been awarded the 2025 Braddock Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication, an honor that recognizes an outstanding article on the writing or the teaching of writing.
The article was written by six authors, including two Black women professors. The authors are all affiliated with Stanford University’s Black Development Lab, a multi-university, interdisciplinary collective of faculty, students, and educators whose scholarship, teaching, and activism center on Black educators and the study of linguistics.
Michelle Petty Grue is an assistant teaching professor of writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her interdisciplinary research on education and writing draws from Black feminism to investigate diversity issues in academia, creative writing, and digital writing.
Dr. Grue holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Pepperdine University in California. She earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. from the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Anna Charity Hudley is a professor in the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and co-principal investigator of the Black Development Lab. In her scholarly work, she aims to address the relationship between language variation and educational practices and policies for underrepresented students in higher education.
Dr. Charity Hudley received her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in linguistics from Harvard University. She holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.
In addition to Dr. Grue and Dr. Charity Hudley, the paper was co-authored by Hannah Franz, program associate for graduate advisement at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation; Angela Rowell, a speech-language therapist in San Francisco; Marie Tano, a Ph.D. student in Stanford University’s linguistics department; and Sierra J. Johnson, an undergraduate student majoring in linguistics at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
Once again, we have a cabal of so-called academics with questionable backgrounds from one being biracial, one being an African immigrant from Ghana, a lily-White woman, and a native born Black American woman literally feeding into the deficit theory narrative about Black American written and oral communications. One can similarly make the same linguistic case when comparing written and oral communication patterns between poor Whites in rural Appalachia to poor Whites from the Bayous in Louisiana or Northern California. In fact, if this so-called ‘award winning’ article was so group breaking why do people have to pay for it. In other words, make this work available for free in order for it to be intellectually interrogated.
Brava on a well timed work.