Description:
The Antiracist Writing Workshop is a call to create healthy, sustainable, and empowering artistic communities for a new millennium of writers. Inspired by June Jordan 's 1995 Poetry for the People, here is a blueprint for a 21st-century workshop model that protects and platforms writers of color. Instead of earmarking dusty anthologies, imagine workshop participants Skyping with contemporary writers of difference. Instead of tolerating bigoted criticism, imagine workshop participants moderating their own feedback sessions. Instead of yielding to the red-penned judgement of instructors, imagine workshop participants citing their own text in dialogue. The Antiracist Writing Workshop is essential reading for anyone looking to revolutionize the old workshop model into an enlightened, democratic counterculture.
Review Quotes:
"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