Nancy Sommers

Nancy Sommers led the Harvard College Writing Program for twenty years, directing the first-year program, establishing the Harvard Writing Project, and leading a series of research studies about college writers. To honor her work at Harvard, she was awarded an endowed chair, the Sosland Chair in Writing. Sommers now teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she leads writing workshops and mentors new writing instructors. She is the co-author of four writing textbooks, including A Writer's Reference and A Pocket Style Manual, and a prize-winning essayist for her personal essays and articles about teaching writing. Over the last two decades, Sommers helped establish writing programs at universities in Asia and Europe, lectured at more than 100 universities on all aspects of teaching writing, and created three films about the culture of college writing.