JOHN J. RUSZKIEWICZ is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin where he has taught literature, rhetoric, and writing for more than thirty years. A winner of the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award, he was instrumental in creating the Department of Rhetoric and Writing in 1993 and directed the unit from 2001-05. He has also served as president of the Conference of College Teachers of English (CCTE) of Texas. For Bedford/St. Martin's, he is also the co-author, with Andrea A. Lunsford, of The Presence of Others, Fifth Edition, and Everything's an Argument, Fifth Edition.