Compositions, a Life

Judith Pearl Summerfield’s career in higher education is unparalleled. Her writing, teaching, teacher research, and university-wide program development have been honored by major local, state, and national organizations, including being named New York State Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation. The author or editor of ten books, and dozens of scholarly chapters and articles, she also writes fiction and poetry, and keeps a daily journal. Compositions, A Life: An Autoethnography is a story of Summerfield’s life and career, and, simultaneously, a self-conscious example of how to tell such stories. Told by a master storyteller, who is also a scholar of narrative, and a compelling teacher of writing and literature, the book embraces a meta-textual approach. Summerfield focuses on ethnographic elements of language, family, culture, and history, beginning with her childhood in a coal mining town in southwestern Pennsylvania with a story-telling father who survived the Russian Revolution in Ukraine, and a mother who insisted she learn proper English usage. She chronicles her education during the feminist, Civil Rights, and cultural revolutions of the last century, and critically self-examines her 40 years of teaching and leadership at The City University of New York (1972-2015). The book is a tour de force mix of illustrative writing styles, designed as models for learning and teaching composition/rhetoric, literature, and critical or aesthetic reading. The book includes twenty-five writing prompts, and twenty-plus images to engage reader response, and can be used in introductory writing courses, graduate and professional programs, and in community writing groups.

"Judith Summerfield’s latest book, Compositions, a Life: An Autoethnography, is a celebration of all the ways a story can be told: through family history both harrowing and mundane, through elegiac portraits of place, through photographs of people living and dead (and recipes in their handwriting), and above all through the act of writing stories into being. It’s part folk art, part writing manual, part cultural history. This is a book to read with a pencil in your hand, because Summerfield will inspire her readers to commit their own stories to shimmering life." Crystal Benedicks, Ph.D., Department of English, Co-Chair of First-Year Experience, Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum, "In Compositions, a Life: An Autoethnography, Judith Summerfield weaves together individual and collective history to reflect on the texts, people, places, and institutions that have informed her thoughtful work as a teacher, writer, and higher education administrator. Interspersing personal memoir with engaging writing exercises, Summerfield not only explores the narrative compositions of her life but also asks readers to reflect on stories of their own. Compositions, a Life is a powerful and poignant testament to the ways in which we are all connected and an argument for why we must continue to strive to understand ourselves and others, through storytelling, reading, writing, listening, and community." Caroline Hellman, Ph.D., Professor of English/Interim Special Assistant to the President, City Tech, CUNY

Judith Pearl Summerfield, Professor of English, Emerita, Queens College, The City University of New York. B.A., English and History, M.A., English, University of Pittsburgh. Ph.D., English Education, New York University. Author or editor of 10 books, and recipient of major grants and awards from Modern Language Association, Carnegie Foundation, and US Department of Education, among others.