Insiders, Outliers: Centering Adult Student Writers at an Hbcu

Winner of the 2026 Outstanding Book Award in the Monograph category from the Conference on College Composition and Communication

Insiders, Outliers invites readers into the lives of adult HBCU students for whom college is one meaningful activity among many. Although adults over the age of twenty-four comprise a quarter of all undergraduates, they are institutionally segregated and only partially served by a US higher education system that remains organized around traditional-aged learners. Even as such students are regarded as a market for postsecondary institutions, they are routinely marginalized by institutional barriers. Students' stories of their personal, professional, community, and academic writing experiences illuminate a critical need for more age-inclusive practices across academia. Their cases also offer new conceptual models of writing as an ethical and emotional practice that fuels changes for individuals and the people and institutions that they care about--including higher education. What adult students reveal about writing across their life domains has powerful implications for conceptualizing writing as a complex form of agency and for teaching writing across the curriculum.