Description
Book SynopsisThis easy-to-use guide explains how to recruit, nourish, and fortify writers of color through innovative reading, writing, workshop, critique, and assessment strategies.
A captivating mix of memoir and progressive teaching strategies, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom demonstrates how to be culturally attuned, twenty-first century educators.
The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a call to create healthy, sustainable, and empowering classroom communities. Award-winning educator Felicia Rose Chavez exposes the invisible politics of power and privilege that have silenced writers of color for far too long. It’s more urgent than ever that we consciously work against traditions of dominance in the classroom, but what specific actions can we take to achieve authentically inclusive communities? Together, we will address how to:
· Deconstruct our biases to achieve a cultural shift in perspective.
· Design a democratic teaching model to create safe spaces for creative concentration.
· Recruit, nourish, and fortify students of color to best empower them to exercise voice.
· Embolden our students to self-advocate as responsible citizens in a globalized community.
Finally, a teaching model that protects and platforms students of color, because every writer deserves access to a public voice. For anyone looking to liberate their thinking from “the way it’s always been done,” The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a clear, compelling guidebook on a necessary step forward.
Trade Review“With personal anecdotes and memories, with brilliant readings of spaces, classrooms, and texts, Felicia Rose Chavez communicates so much of what is truly at stake in the classroom: our voices, our histories, and our capacities to live ethically, curiously, and in true and deep connection with ourselves and others. This book is a gorgeous dismantling just as it is an urgent offering up of strategies and questions. My heart is so alive reading this.”
—Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
“‘How does one write but not necessarily learn voice?’ This is one of the most halting and necessary questions Felicia Rose Chavez poses in The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. What Chavez presents from her experience as workshop participant, artist, activist, and professor is vital and generous.”
—Jennifer Baker, editor of Everyday People
“There is power in the words we write. Understanding how we can use those words to build community, challenge racism, and decolonize classrooms is the work of anti-racist educators. Chavez lays out powerful and inclusive ways to model a writing workshop structure that would make June Jordan proud.”
—Dr. Bettina L. Love, author of We Want to Do More Than Survive
“‘Dismantle’ has become a trendy word in our current historical moment. We use it, but don't really know how to dismantle. If we are truly going to learn, write, and read in an equitable, supportive, creative, humanity-driven environment that seeks to replace white-centered, patriarchal teaching techniques, this book is required reading. It's bound to be an instant classic.”
—Willie Perdomo, author of The Crazy Bunch
“Felicia Chavez's The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a generational intervention. Chavez is expanding expectations of How-To books while giving radical generative portals of entry into workshop reconstruction. Every writing teacher on Earth needs this book."
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"I just read The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop; so many great insights into the whiteness of the discussion of craft and the creative writing classroom. Great book for writing teachers and librarians (like me) who support creative writing programs or English departments with creative writing courses."
—Thomas Dodson, Southern Oregon University LibrarianTable of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter One: Decolonizing the Creative Classroom
Chapter Two: Preparing for Change
Chapter Three: Fostering Engagement, Mindfulness, and Generosity
Chapter Four: Instituting Reading and Writing Rituals
Chapter Five: Completing the Canon
Chapter Six: Owning the Language of Craft
Chapter Seven: TeachingWriters to Workshop
Chapter Eight:Conferencing as Critique
Chapter Nine: Promoting Camaraderie and Collective Power
Appendix: Platforming Writers of Color: A 21st Century Reference Guide
