Wenqi Cui, John Hopkins University
This reflection traces my editorial journey with The Peer Review (TPR), from entering the journal as an author learning how to join its conversations, to later helping sustain them as graduate editor and web editor. In these roles, I collaborated with guest editors to develop special issues, supported authors through the writing and review process, mentored new editors, and maintained the journal’s digital platform. Through this work, I see editorial work as a transnational, collaborative practice of care, supporting underrepresented and emerging scholars, embracing diverse voices and positionalities, bridging linguistic, cultural, and epistemic differences, as well as sustaining the systems that keep dialogue and connection alive.
Entering the Space: Publishing on TPR
I’ve long heard of The Peer Review, but my first real encounter came when my article, Identity Construction of a Multilingual Writing Tutor, was published in the journal in 2020—a case study examining how one multilingual tutor co-constructed his identity through language that indexed social meanings and stances. His linguistic practices not only shaped his identity but also maintained and reinforced the writing center’s values, culture, and tenets (Cui, 2020). I was thrilled and deeply grateful that my work had found a home in a journal that valued inquiry grounded in identity, culture, and the everyday realities of writing center work, without knowing that, just a year later, I would become part of its editorial team. That publication became more than a milestone; it opened a door. It showed me how writing center scholarship could bring together intellectual inquiry and collective practice, and how TPR modeled the kind of inclusion our field often aspires to.
In her outgoing editor’s reflection, Professional Editor Genie Giaimo revisited Hallman Martini’s founding vision for TPR, a journal meant “to engage, to prepare, and to promote the next generation of writing center scholars” (2015, n.p.). I saw my own path in this vision. TPR had not only published my work but had also drawn me into its collaborative mission of preparing new scholars and shaping how our community makes and shares knowledge.
Building and Upholding the Space: Joining TPR
In Fall 2021, I joined TPR as a graduate editor for special issues, simply hoping to learn more about how a journal comes together and how ideas move from submission to publication. What I found was the unseen labor, thoughtful negotiations, and everyday acts of care that support the editorial process, through which ideas, perspectives, and power relations are constantly balanced, shaping what knowledge comes forward and how it circulates. Editorial work is never neutral. It is always an act of gatekeeping and gate opening, a process of making choices about what to include, what to refine, and how to create space for a wider range of voices (Blewett et al., 2019; Natarajan & Cui, forthcoming).
Editorial Work on Special Issues
The first special issue I worked on began as a straightforward task: proposing a topic, reaching out to guest editors, seeing it through to publication, and managing its online production and release on TPR’s platform. After inviting Srividya Natarajan and Krista Speicher Sarraf to join me, what started as a facilitation role quickly evolved into a more fully engaged form of participation. Together, we co-edited the 2023 special issue, “(Re)Investigating Writing Center Commonplaces.”
Applying the lens of female transnational scholars of color, we sought to enact “rhetorical listening, an openness to understand and negotiate across differences” (Cui, 2019), to bridge linguistic, cultural, and epistemological divides, and to ensure inclusivity and equity at every stage of the editorial process. We implemented anti-oppressive editorial practices informed by the Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices Heuristic (2021). The process was dynamic and deeply collaborative. We invited submissions from emerging and underrepresented scholars, paired authors and reviewers whose approaches and values resonated, and mentored contributors as they navigated the complexities of review and revision. We treated copyediting as a form of conversation rather than correction, debated what “rigor” should mean when rigor has so often been defined by dominant norms, and wrestled with how to honor authors’ linguistic rhythms while maintaining clarity for readers.
Over time, our editorial work unfolded as a space of encounter where ideas meet, perspectives interact, and difference generates new possibilities—embodying “transnationalism as process,” an ongoing creation of connections across linguistic, ideological, and geopolitical boundaries (Hou et al., 2021, p. 308). Yet the very effort to build and sustain such a space brought its own challenges, as we grappled with how to support underrepresented authors without reproducing the linguistic and methodological norms that exclude them. Amid these tensions, mentorship became a central part of our practice: we worked closely with contributors to navigate feedback, clarify ideas, and build confidence in their scholarly voices through ongoing conversations over email and Zoom.
Mentorship
I later extended this commitment by mentoring two PhD students who guest-edited one of our special issues, Enacting Linguistic Justice in/through Writing Centers (Spring 2024). I guided them through each stage of the process—from developing the Call for Proposal and communicating with authors, to managing submissions, reviews, revisions, edits, and preparing the issue for publication. We met multiple times over Zoom and exchanged countless emails to discuss questions, decisions, and next steps. Throughout, I shared my own experiences, offered strategies, flagged common pitfalls, and provided sample documents and templates to support their editorial work.
Initially, I wanted to share what I had learned, but mentorship turned out to be its own kind of learning. Guidance sometimes met resistance, collaboration was uneven, and patience often came late. Mentoring, like editing, became a transnational practice, a continual negotiation of meaning, difference, and connection across positionalities. Aja Martinez (2020) writes that genuine inclusion depends on “listening, attending, acknowledging, and honoring” the voices of others. To honor someone’s agency is to accept that they may not take your advice or follow your path. Mentorship, then, is about walking beside others as they find their own way forward.
Working on these two special issues bridged my early experiences of entering the field and learning its practices with a deeper commitment to sustaining it—supporting authors, mentoring new editors, and shaping the conversations that move our work forward. What began as learning how to participate became a practice of holding the door open and accompanying others as they find their way, carrying forward the community that first welcomed me.
Tending the Digital Home
When the previous web editor unexpectedly stepped away in 2024, I stepped in with little time to prepare. Although I was familiar with the publishing platform from publishing the two special issues mentioned earlier, maintaining the entire site required a different level of expertise. I had to learn about the system from the inside out, understanding its content management structure, workflows, and style templates, and how each file, hyperlink, and layout element held the journal together. The platform runs on an older WordPress version, kept for stability and compatibility with existing content. Still, the limitations are clear. Embedding video or interactive media often requires manual coding or creative workarounds. Even small design changes, adjusting spacing, replacing a corrupted image, or reformatting a table, can take hours to troubleshoot. Maintaining consistency across an aging system means constantly balancing innovation with stability, finding solutions that work without breaking what already functions.
Web editing proved to be both technical and editorial. I was responsible for publishing each new issue (9.1 and 9.2), including uploading articles, formatting them for online display, and ensuring that citations, figures, tables, links, and multimedia elements such as images, audio, and videos functioned properly. Even a small formatting error or misplaced line of code could distort an entire article, so the work demanded precision, attention to detail and design, persistence, care, and patience. The role also required close coordination. Each publication cycle involved communicating with authors to request high-resolution figures, captions, and alt text; verify tables, graphics, and accessibility standards; and confirm that citations, links, and references followed journal style. Because authors varied in their familiarity with digital publishing, much of the correspondence involved clarifying details or troubleshooting files together. Even small omissions could slow publication. In this sense, web editing calls for balancing technical accuracy with editorial judgment, meeting deadlines while accommodating the human pace of collaboration.
As I prepared to step away, I mentored the incoming web editor, Madison Browne, introducing her to the publishing platform, sharing strategies, and walking her through the process of uploading, formatting, and publishing new content. Together, we worked on several articles in the recently published issue 10.1, troubleshooting issues as they arose and reflecting on design and editorial decisions: how to arrange text, images, and videos for readability, balance design with accessibility, communicate with authors, and align with TPR’s style guide. From there, Madison took the lead and completed the remaining work independently. Our conversations often centered on the reader’s experience, and I shared the principles that had guided my own approach: anticipating readers’ needs, maintaining consistency, and fostering accessibility. I hope these might offer a useful starting point for her own editorial practice.
Another ongoing initiative, led by our Professional Editor, Genie Giaimo, centered on TPR’s long-term preservation—an essential and forward-looking effort seeking a stable, open-access home for its issues and preserving the history and collective labor that connect our contributors, readers, and researchers. As part of that effort, we explored options for archiving The Peer Review and I contributed by consulting my university librarian, editor Susanne Hall for insights from her experience archiving Prompt, and later the WAC Clearinghouse about potential repositories and digital preservation frameworks. As new technology arises and old technology becomes obsolete, many academic journals in our field are having similar conversations. Some journals, like the Writing Center Journal (WCJ) and, recently, WLN, have transitioned to fully digital formats. WLN recently moved its archive and journal to the WAC Clearinghouse.
Working behind the screen as a web editor offered a different perspective on editorial care. The work was detailed and often invisible, yet every adjustment—a corrected link, a clarified citation, an accessible figure—shaped how knowledge reached our readers. Seen this way, web editing became an act of care for the journal’s ecosystem: the living network that allows ideas to circulate, endure, and remain part of an ongoing scholarly conversation. While my earlier work as a graduate editor centered on community—mentoring authors, supporting guest editors, facilitating dialogue, and shaping ideas, this role allowed me to extend that care to the infrastructure that underpins it over time, working towards preservation, accessibility, and evolution of knowledge.
Carrying the Work Forward
Through these roles, I’ve learned that editing is a collective practice that keeps knowledge and community in motion. It bridges voices, positionalities, and ways of knowing, reimagining how scholarship is created, circulated, and received. As I step away from my editorial role, I carry not only a clearer sense of how scholarship moves but a deep appreciation for the collaborative labor that sustains it. Each issue, each article, bears traces of the editors, reviewers, and authors whose choices, questions, and ongoing negotiations continue to shape our field’s conversations.
I am deeply grateful to TPR Professional Editor, Genie Giaimo, whose guidance, support, trust, and patience made my work not only possible but meaningful and joyful. I also extend my sincere thanks to the editorial team—Managing Editor Joseph Cheatle and Graduate Editors Andrew Yim and Rabail Qayyum—for their collegial support. My gratitude also goes to the authors, reviewers, and copy editors who uphold TPR’s commitment to embracing diverse languages, genres, and epistemologies, as well as to keeping publishing a practice of care as much as of rigor.
To those who come next, I offer this hope: imagine editorial work as craft—grounded in care and rhetorical listening, and committed to holding the door open for others while tending the spaces that keep dialogue alive across differences, positionalities, and ways of knowing as we read, respond, and make meaning together.
References
Anti-racist scholarly reviewing practices: A heuristic for editors, reviewers, and authors. 2021. https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic. Accessed 1 November 2025.
Blewett, K. LaVecchia, C. M., Micciche, L. R., & Morris, J. (2019). Editing as inclusion activism. College English, 81(4), 273–296. https://ocul-uwo.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01OCUL_UWO/t54l2v/cdi_proquest_journals_2215485872
Cui, W. (2020) Multilingual Writing Tutor Constructs Identities in Tutoring Sessions. The Peer Review, 3(2). https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/issue-3-2/identity-construction-of-a-multilingual-writing-tutor/
Cui, W. (2019). Rhetorical Listening Pedagogy: Promoting Communication Across Cultural and Societal Groups with Video Narrative. Computers and Composition, 54. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S8755461517301329
Hou, M., Cruz., N., Glass, C., & Lee, S. (2021). Transnational postgraduates: Navigating academic trajectories in the globalized university. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 30(3), 306-324. https://doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2020.1853590
Martinez, A. (2020). Counterstory: The rhetoric and writing of critical race theory. National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=7101627
Natarajan, V., & Cui, W. (forthcoming). Holding the gate open: Transnational feminists doing editorial work together. In Beth Leahy, Erica Cirillo-McCarthy, Celeste Del Russo, & Amanda Fields (Eds.), Still Writing Together: Perspectives on Collaborative Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition. WAC Clearinghouse.