The CBW archive contains The CBWS/CBW Newsletter from 1982-1998, as well as additional historical material, such as the original flyer Charles Guilford produced to advertise CBW or the call to convention of the 4th National Basic Writing Conference, sponsored by CBW.  To my knowledge, The Newsletter is not available in libraries. Issues now exist only in personal collections of old materials. Paper copies are becoming tattered, so to preserve the information, the newsletter was scanned onto the CBW website as an archive.

Some materials are missing. A survey page is missing from Volume 10, Number 1, and we have only the first four pages of Volume 12, Number 1, so we need a complete copy of 12.1.  If you have these materials or know of any additional issues or other historical artifacts of the organization, please contact Greg Glau.

This archive may be of interest to those who want to learn more about basic writing and the history of the organization. It may also be useful to scholars of the history of professional organizations—the archive reveals how CBW emerged and how it has been reinvented in response to new conditions and situations, under the guidance of new people.

Brief history of CBW

The Conference on Basic Writing began in 1980 when Charles Guilford, founder and first chair (then at Kansas State University), posted a sign-up sheet at the Washington, DC 1980 CCCC.  The group was originally called the Conference on Basic Writing Skills (CBWS); the first regular Special Interest Group meeting was held the following year at the Dallas 1981 CCCC.  In 1982, after Guilford had moved to Boise State University, the CBWS Newsletter began publication.   In those early days, The Newsletter was created on an electric typewriter and laid out by hand with press-on sticker headlines.  Issued sporadically, The Newsletter often made it into mailboxes just days before the annual CCCC meeting. The Newsletter continued production at Boise State University until 1986 when Karen Uehling, the second Chair, went on family leave.
CBWS was then in limbo until 1988, when it was reorganized as the Conference on Basic Writing under the capable leadership of Peter Dow Adams of Essex Community College and Carolyn Kirkpatrick of York College, CUNY, third Chair and Associate Chair, respectively.  During these years, the late 1980s and early 1990s, CBW grew and solidified, and the newsletter was expanded and published regularly, offering substantive articles and consistent columns.  It was typeset and printed on an attractive gray paper.  In 1992, Adams and Kirkpatrick stepped down. At this time, CBW entered a transitional period into the electronic age with the development of the CBW discussion list, website, and most recently the BWe: Basic Writing e-Journal.  The Newsletter continued publication, sometimes sporadically, until 1998 when it ceased publication to become in 1999 BWe.

Past Chairs and Associate Chairs since 1992 have included Suellynn Duffey, then Ohio State University, later University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire; Jeanne Gunner, University of California at Los Angeles Writing Programs, later Santa Clara University, CA:, Gerri McNenny, University of Houston Downtown, later Fullerton State University, CA, and Sallyanne Fitzgerald, University of Missouri-St. Louis, later Chabot College, Hayward, CA. Current co-chairs are Linda Adler-Kassner, University of Michigan, Dearborn, later, Eastern Michigan University, Ann Arbor; and Greg Glau, Arizona State University.

The CBWS/CBW Newsletter is indexed in CompPile: http://comppile.tamucc.edu/
CompPile is compiled by Rich Haswell.

--Karen S. Uehling, August 2001

The newsletters are in Adobe Acrobat format, so nearly any computer should be able to download and read them.  If you don't have Adobe Acrobat, you can download it free at

If you've never used Adobe, you might be surprised to see how BIG the files sometimes look when they're opened -- note there's a small control on the lower left-hand side, where you can change the percentage of the size of the document -- from really large to really small.

Starting in 1999, the Newsletter was changed to BWe: Basic Writing e-Journal, an electronic peer-reviewed journal.  This journal can be reached through the BWe link on the Conference on Basic Writing Page.