Kirsti Cole is a Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Literature at Minnesota State University. She is the faculty chair of the Teaching Writing Graduate Certificate and Master’s of Communication and Composition programs. She has published articles in Women’s Studies in Communication, TCQ, Feminist Media Studies, College English, harlot, and thirdspace, as well as a number of chapters in edited collections. Her collection Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics was published in 2014. Her collections with Holly Hassel, Surviving Sexism in the Academy: Feminist Strategies for Leadership (2017) and Academic Labor beyond the College Classroom: Working for Our Values (2020) were published by Routledge Press. She has a forthcoming collection, also co-edited with Holly Hassel, Transformations: Change Work Across Writing Programs, Pedagogies, and Practices (Utah State University Press 2020).
Valerie Renegar is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Southwestern University. Her research focuses on feminist rhetoric as well as the role of rhetoric in social change. Her work appears in several outlets including Hypatia, Women’s Studies in Communication, Communication Studies, Howard Journal of Communications, and the Western Journal of Communication as well as chapters in a number of edited collections.
Val and Kirsti are both stepmothers and have given papers on stepmothering and rhetoric at Rhetoric Society of America and Rhetoric Society of Europe conferences. We have published a chapter, “The Wicked Stepmother Online: Maternal Identity and Personal Narrative in Social Media” in a collection from Demeter Press (Basden and Martin 2016), and an article in Women’s Studies in Communication, “‘Evil is Part of the Territory’: Inventing the Stepmother in Self-Help Books” (2019).