This article introduces affinity groups as a writing center professional development initiative in support of the inclusion of our LGBTQ+ employees. These groups invite employees with shared identities to form a supportive community and hold critical conversations about relevant topics. A writing center at a large university in the Southeastern United States engaged in queer worldmaking and launched two affinity groups in support of LGBTQ+ inclusion: the LGBTQ+ Alliance, and the LGBTQ+ Allies. In this article, the authors engage in storytelling to consider how participating in and leading affinity groups impacted their professionalization and their sense of welcome. They conclude with reflections on how writing center administrators can queer their approach to staff professional development with the goal of creating a more welcoming workplace for LGBTQ+ employees.

In the University of Minnesota’s Student Writing Support program, we gather, record, and share student and course information in order to support consultants in their work with writers; to assess and improve our own practice; and to make compelling, data-driven arguments for the center’s continued existence. Recognizing moments when these data-collection practices worked against the relationships we wanted to build with student writers, we began to critique these practices, with the goal of creating more intentional criteria and methods for soliciting client information. In Fall 2013, we developed and introduced an online Student Profile tool where clients could indicate their preferred name, provide a guide to pronouncing their name, include their gender pronouns, list any language(s) they speak and/or write, and indicate anything else they would like our consultants to know about them as writers/learners. We have become particularly interested in what students choose to share about themselves in that last open-ended prompt: When we give students opportunities to disclose aspects of their identity, what do we learn about them and about how they construct their identities in the context of a writing consultation? In this article we share our analysis of client data we collected in 2016–17, which reveals students’ awareness of their identities as writers, students, and learners as well as the complexities of these identities in a writing center context. Our findings also speak to larger conversations about the ways student identities are constructed and created within higher education.

Abstract The article describes the process that four writing center consultants took to design and implement an antiracist workshop at the Oklahoma State University Writing Center (OSUWC). Using antiracist pedagogy, feminist invitational rhetoric, and inclusive writing center pedagogy, this essay documents the creation of an antiracist workshop designed for writing center staff and consultants, our presentation of the workshop at the South Central Writing Centers Association conference, the revision process, and training of writing center staff at the OSUWC. Rather than outline a one-size-fits-all workshop, this article provides a framework for addressing racism with reflexive, context-based resources.