Trixie Smith, Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures and Director of The Writing Center at Michigan State University, was awarded the 2025 International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) Muriel Harris Outstanding Service Award, which recognizes outstanding service that has benefited the writing center community in significant and broad-based ways.
This award, which has been given 16 times since its inception in 1984, represents the pinnacle of achievement in the international writing center community, since service is integral to any writing center’s mission and function, and writing center personnel strive to build collaborative and productive relationships both within and outside their institutions.
Smith was nominated for the award by Elise Dixon, Director of the Cooperative Learning Center at California State University, Monterey Bay, and by Rachel Robinson-Zetzer, Assistant Professor and Director of the Writing Instruction Program at Northern Kentucky University. Supporting the nomination was Dianna Baldwin, Director of the Center for Academic Success at Longwood University.
The nomination materials showed the long commitment that Smith has had to the writing center community by taking leadership roles in writing center professional organizations, mentoring students and tutors, and scholarship that focuses on writing center theory and practice, history, and administration.
“Through her mentorship, Trixie has created a legacy of writing center professionals whose life’s work has been to create humanizing, just, caring, intellectual communities and spaces for collaborative learning,” Dixon wrote in her nomination letter.
Dixon first met Smith in 2015 as an incoming Ph.D. student at Michigan State University, and over the past 10 years, Smith has been a professor, mentor, boss, dissertation advisor, and friend to Dixon, who also wrote that “Because of Trixie, I am a better mentor to those in the writing center community, and the same is true for anyone who has been blessed by her friendship, leadership, service, and mentorship over the years. I truly can’t think of anyone more deserving of this award.”
“Through her mentorship, Trixie has created a legacy of writing center professionals whose life’s work has been to create humanizing, just, caring, intellectual communities and spaces for collaborative learning.”
Elise Dixon, Director of the Cooperative Learning Center at California State University, Monterey Bay
Robinson-Zetzer also is a former student of Smith, who first met Smith in 2003. Since then, Smith has been a mentor, supervisor, professor, committee member, dissertation director, and colleague to Robinson-Zetzer.
“Trixie changed the trajectory of my career by simply modeling empathetic, supportive, professional work in Writing Studies. Without Trixie’s mentorship and modeling, I, and so many of my peers, would not be where we are today,” Robinson-Zetzer wrote in her nomination letter. “The longer I’ve known Trixie, the more accustomed I’ve become to seeing the micro ways she helps her students. The countless letters she’s written, dissertations/theses she’s directed, and classes she’s taught pale in comparison to the lives she’s changed through mentorship. Trixie truly is a model for not only how to make professional relationships last, but also how to continually, and effortlessly, build new ones. She is the epitome of what the IWCA Muriel Harris Service Award stands for, and I couldn’t be happier to nominate her.”
Baldwin has been friends with Smith since 2005 and worked with and for Smith for 10 years as the Associate Director of The Writing Center at Michigan State University.
“I would not be a writing center director today if it weren’t for Trixie Smith,” Baldwin wrote in her letter of support. “The 10 years I spent working for and with Trixie laid the foundation for everything I do today in my own center. Trixie has a way of mentoring that never actually ‘feels’ like you are being mentored. It always feels like a collaboration, and she genuinely values your input. She willingly gives her time and energy to help you succeed. Without her as a mentor, boss, and friend, I would not be directing my own center.
“But Trixie has done so much more than turn out newly minted writing center directors (and there have been quite a few), she has also given so much to the writing center community at large. She has written countless essays to progress the field of writing center work as well as her share of books. But perhaps her most ambitious project to date is the collaboration started with partners in Africa who wanted to learn about and start their own writing centers. Trixie has given so much time to giving workshops, doing seminars, and meeting with anyone who wants to learn more. She has traveled to and from Africa numerous times to do this important work in-person rather than just zoom because Trixie knows that it’s the people who count.”
“Trixie changed the trajectory of my career by simply modeling empathetic, supportive, professional work in Writing Studies. Without Trixie’s mentorship and modeling, I, and so many of my peers, would not be where we are today.”
Rachel Robinson-Zetzer, Assistant Professor and Director of the Writing Instruction Program at Northern Kentucky University
Smith recently was awarded a Strategic Partnership Grant from MSU’s Center for Gender in Global Context to attend the Fifth Annual International Conference on Water in Africa (ICWA), scheduled for March 2026, with additional support from MSU’s College of Arts & Letters and WRAC. This is the second time Smith will participate in the ICWA, a four-day conference annually hosted by the Water and Public Health Research Group at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Earlier this year, Smith attended the Fourth Annual ICWA where she hosted three writing workshops.
Smith joined the faculty at MSU in August 2007. Since then, she has taught a wide range of courses. Her teaching and research are infused with issues of gender, queerness, and activism even as they revolve around writing center theory and practice, writing pedagogy, and teacher training.
She is the Director of the Red Cedar Writing Project, a National Writing Project site devoted to strengthening literacy education across the state of Michigan. Her leadership extends globally as well as Director of the Global Alliances in Literacy and Engagement (GALE) at MSU, for which she helps build partnerships in literacy and teacher development around the world.
She was recognized as the 2025 recipient of the Muriel Harris Outstanding Service Award at the IWCA Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was held Oct. 15-18, 2025.
Smith also received the 2025-2026 Charles Carpenter Fries Award presented by the Michigan Council of Teachers of English (MCTE). This statewide award honors educators whose distinguished career reflects a lifelong commitment to the teaching of English, to literacy, and to the professional development of teachers.
By Kim Popiolek
