Bonnie Sunstein
For over twenty years in Iowa, Bonnie Sunstein has taught nonfiction writing, ethnographic research, methods of teaching of writing, and folklore studies, and directs programs in both undergraduate writing and English education. She has established many community writing events for local student writers, including the twice-yearly “Writers Gone Public” undergraduate readings and the “Collaborative Writing Consultancy,” a writing center for graduate students in the College of Education.
Bonnie leads writing and teaching institutes across the USA, Canada, and around the world. For twenty prior years, she taught in the New England states, at the University of New Hampshire, Northeastern University, Rivier College, and in Massachusetts public schools. During summers, she teaches in such programs as the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Workshops on Writing and Teaching, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and others. She is currently the national chair of the Norman Mailer Writing awards for high school and college writers.
Her chapters, articles, and poems appear in many professional journals and anthologies. Her award-winning FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research (Bedford St Martins), is now in its fourth edition, and five other books (Heinemann and NCTE) are popular among writers and teachers.
Bonnie is currently working on a new book about teaching nonfiction writing for the University of Chicago Press, where she also leads a project to revise the famous Turabian “Student’s Guide to Writing College Papers.”
She has received national grants from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Imagining America, the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) network, and the National Council of Teachers of English. At Iowa, she has won the Collegiate Teaching Award, the Gerber Award for the Teaching of Writing, three Obermann Center Research Fellowships, and two Arts and Humanities grants.
Research Areas:
Nonfiction Writing
Research Interests:
Nonfiction Writing; English Education & Literacy Studies; Ethnography
