Writing Youth

Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English and director of the Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication at University of California, Irvine.

Overall, Writing Youth is extremely valuable in that it explicitly recognizes young adult fiction as embedded within a wider cultural media context in which young people are not merely passive consumers, but are actively engaged and agential. Alexander's concept of literacy sponsorship has wide-reaching implications not only for literary critics but also for educators and publishers.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Writing (about) YouthChapter One—Literacy’s Hunger Games: Branding MultiliteracyChapter Two—The Darker Side of the Sorting Hat: Representations of Educational Testing in Dystopian Young Adult Fiction, by Jonathan Alexander and Rebecca BlackChapter Three—Beyond The Hunger Games: Becoming CollaborativeChapter Four—Kids in the Aftermath: The Politics of Hurricane Katrina in Young Adult FictionChapter Five—Sponsoring Homonormativity: Sexual Literacies in Queer YA Literature, by William P. Banks and Jonathan AlexanderChapter Six—Seizing the Means of Production, Sort Of: YA Self-Sponsored MultimediaVideos DiscussedBibliographyAbout the Author