The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop

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 Librarian

Felicia Rose Chavez is an award-winning educator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She is the author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom and co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT with Willie Perdomo and Jose Olivarez. Chavez served as Program Director to Young Chicago Authors and founded GirlSpeak, a literary webzine for young women. She went on to teach writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was distinguished as the Most Innovative Instructor of the Year, the University of Iowa, where she was distinguished as the Outstanding Instructor of the Year, and Colorado College, where she received the Theodore Roosevelt Collins Outstanding Faculty Award. Her creative scholarship earned her a Ronald E. McNair Fellowship, a University of Iowa Graduate Deans Fellowship, a Riley Scholar Fellowship, and a Hadley Creatives Fellowship. Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Felicia currently serves as Scholar-in-Residence in Creativity and Innovation at Colorado College. Find her at www.antiracistworkshop.com.

Introduction 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