Jo Ray McCuen

Jo Ray McCuen, later Jo Ray McCuen-Metherell, is an American composition teacher and textbook author whose Readings for Writers, co-authored with Anthony C. Winkler, has been the preeminent rhetorical reader for freshman composition courses across U.S. colleges and universities for more than three decades and is now in its fifteenth edition. Together she and Winkler produced more than a dozen co-authored textbooks on rhetoric, writing, and composition for college publishers including Cengage Learning.

Readings for Writers offers more than seventy selections drawn from a wide range of topics and genres, paired with comprehensive coverage of the writing and research process. The textbook teaches argument, cause and effect, definition, description, narration, and the other rhetorical modes that anchor introductory composition curricula, and includes student model essays, MLA and APA documentation guidance, and revision instruction. It has been continuously updated across fifteen editions to track changes in style, documentation, and the reading interests of college freshmen.

Born in Belgium as the daughter of an American minister, McCuen-Metherell moved with her family from Brussels to Paris to Bern, Switzerland, by the time she was seven years old. She attended the Freies Gymnasium in Bern and grew up speaking fluent French, German, and English. After World War II her parents sent her and her brother to Pacific Union College in California's Napa Valley, where she received her B.A. in English. She taught English and French at the high school level for several years before moving into college teaching and textbook work, and her collaboration with Anthony C. Winkler, which began in 1973, became one of the longest-running author partnerships in American college composition publishing.