The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez

The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom Reviews

• 
  Danielle

  This is essential reading for creative writing teachers at all levels. It is, as described by the author, "a blueprint for a twenty-first century writing workshop that concedes the humanity of people of color so that we may raise our voices in vote for love over hate."
  
  I could quote Felicia Rose Chavez over and over, but here are a couple that stuck with me:
  
  "I didn't know then that I hated school, only that school hated me, so much so that I bent my brown body into a bow to appease it. I broke out in hives, in tears, because I couldn't yet differentiate my love of learning from the hatred of a white supremacist educational system."
  
  "Every student and instructor in the room must belong." p.134
  
  "It is so crucial that 'whiteness' be studied, understood, discussed—so that everyone learns that affirmation of multiculturalism, and an unbiased inclusive perspective, can and should be present whether or not people of color are present." p. 43
• 
  Chyann

  This profoundly moved me both as a student and an educator. I did not realize how much I internalized/ normalized when I was one of the only Black writers, sitting in college workshop classes led by white professors. And I definitely did not realize how much of these practices I was reinforcing in my own classroom until I opened this book. Chavez lays out a blueprint for a care-centered, community-centered, and student-centered classroom. One where students unlearn the ideas that writing is a competition and workshop should be treated as reoccurring sacrifices. Chavez instead creates a space where students of color are in control of their own narratives. She discusses the importance of prioritizing voice and craft and seeing writing as the humanizing practice it is. So many gems to take away. And I am dreaming of educators all over the world starting this work as early as possible.
• 
  Ken

  I left this one with a lot of thoughts. Where Bird by Bird is for writers, this one is for writing professors and workshop leaders. Part memoir, part workshop philosophy, Chavez provides a lot of insight into better, more equitable ways of organizing creative writing courses. I particularly liked learning about her interpretation of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process.
  
  I think this would make a good addition to every writing instructor's library, with the one caveat that it should be in addition to other antiracist resource books. I think there is a lot of expectation that readers are knowledgeable about and are conversant in the topics of antiracism and decolonialization, and I think that context is necessary to get the most out of this book.
• 
  KA

  Educators, regardless of subject or grade, should read this book.
• 
  Jen

  One of the most authentic books in this genre that I’ve read. And I’ve read most of them.
• 
  Idris

  Essential writing for critical times
• 
  Eryn McVay

  To say this book has changed me, fundamentally, is an understatement.
  
  Felicia puts into words so clearly, specifically, and beautifully things I didn’t even know I was thinking, but when I read it, found myself yelling “YES!!” And highlighting and starring and drawing hearts in the margins.
  
  This book has been my guiding light this semester as I teach my first playwriting class that is 100% mine. I only regret that I don’t have enough hours in my course to follow the curriculum she outlines to the letter, but there’s simply not enough time. Even so, using an anti-racist curriculum and discovery-based learning model, I’ve watched as my students blossom and shine and radiate creativity. They feel free to voice their truths, and they hear their peers’ truth with respect, even if they can’t directly relate. And their writing is better for it.
  
  More so, this book has changed my own creative process, and I can’t ever go back. I feel like a child again, excited by the blank page, and in awe of my own imagination. White supremacy truly poisons all facets of life and culture, and I didn’t even realize I had been poisoning myself by ascribing to its methodology of creativity. Thank you, Felicia. For the lesson plans, the anecdotes, the reading list, the call-outs, the call-ins. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
• 
  Rachel Polacek

  Wow. This book is geared toward college workshop professors/facilitators, but so many ideas can be translated into the secondary language arts classroom. Student voice and empowering students through their experiences and writing is the constant theme of this book. Felicia Rose Chavez is vulnerable and unrelenting in her pursuit of an equitable writing classroom, and to encourage others to create the same.
• 
  Stephanie

  If you teach creative writing, you need to read this book. It will blow your mind in the best possible way, and the more people who read it, along with Matthew Sallesses Craft in the Real World, the more we can break open our teaching in the ways it needs to be broken open. I am completely changing how I teach based on these books—and I “thought” I was a progressive teacher. Not nearly enough.
• 
  Tanya Gold

  Every one of those bookmarks is a passage that's relevant to developmental editors. Go grab a copy of this book, edibuddies. Seriously.
  
  
• 
  Eman

  This book inspires and discomfits. Its primary audience is writing teachers, but I think it has important insights for anyone wanting to build writing community, anyone in a writing group, anyone uncomfortable with the writing education they’ve gotten. Anyone who believes that nurturing writers is key to a better, more equitable and inclusive future.
• 
  Anne

  I have always accepted the workshop model because every writing class I ever took used it, but this book makes an excellent case for reconsidering the pedagogy and presents a clear and exciting new model. I hope to try it if I ever teach a creative writing class again.
• 
  Joe

  A sensible and personable book from an engaged and committed teacher. I’m not sure that there is a whole lot that is new in it, though.
• 
  AJ Nolan

  An interesting approach to the creative writing workshop, from which I plan to implement numerous ideas, especially in empowering the person being workshopped to run their own workshop and not be silenced. Chavez's description of her experience as a student and of how she now teaches were well written and detailed. I admit to occasionally being ruffled by the tenor of her claims about techniques, as if she was the first to think of teaching a diverse roster or writers, but she is right in how that is most often not done. I also wish she would have acknowledged her privilege of her position as the Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College, where I imagine she likely teaches a 2-2 or even 1-1 load, or the equivalent thereof with CC's Block system. Which is good, but it made it harder to imagine my adapting her techniques when I don't know if she was managing them with a student load of 20 or a load of 100 students, and also how many students she considered to be a workshop. In my university, we have 20 students in our undergraduate workshop, with no exceptions. And I teach a 4-4 load, usually with 3 different preps each semester. And rather than working in a private college with 2000 students, I teach in a public university with 25,000 students, a large portion of whom are POC and first generation students with little ability to afford to print as much as she recommends (nor does the university budget provide for faculty to print that much). So while I value the book for being anti-racist, and I absolutely am incorporating a lot of her ideas, the lack of either acknowledgement or awareness of difference in faculty's loads and circumstances, and of public university student's differing experiences, was a little off putting. But, again, four stars for being, at its core, a foundationally useful text.
• 
  William

  I like that Felicia shares her own experiences being a minority woman in educational settings dominated by white men, older white men. She goes between her own experiences in writing workshops and how to utilize workshops to include everyone, not just those white men mentioned earlier. She tells her own personal writing journey which lead to the necessity of this book, which reminds me a little bit of Stephen Kings On Writing. In her own style she shares both personal writing experiences and then how to use those writing experiences to improve oneself, in this case, it's in workshops. As someone who teaches English on both the high school and the college level and likes to use workshops this book has some really good pointers. Especially for the inclusion of everybody of all races and genders. She speaks as well on being respectful of different cultures and how different minority groups see the world compared to those old white men. She offers activities to make sure that everyone is included, and their voices are heard. I recommend it for those going into the education field where you're going to do a lot of writing workshops.
• 
  Kristin Boldon

  A necessary book for every writing teacher. With its combination of memoir and pedagogical analysis, it shines light on the road forward to a more equitable and rich writing landscape for all. I am already thinking of ways to change how I write, and teach writing.
• 
  Kevin Clouther

  Innovative and important. Grateful to have spent time with this book.
• 
  Marie

  I enjoyed the memoir bits in this most. Definitely resonated with my own experiences. There are concrete ideas for how to structure a writing workshop that's less confrontational, less allowing bias of participants to become authority. I am definitely going to incorporate a lot of this in my teaching.
  
  Found some of the overviews unnecessary, repeating, but ... I'm a super impatient reader. :P
• 
  Sam Moe

  This is one of the most phenomenal texts I have read, ever, and Chavez's work has inspired and changed who I am, and how I approach pedagogy, instruction, and creative writing.
• 
  ashes ➷

  This book was challenging, in a few good and bad ways. I feel it’s important to preface this entire review by saying that, no matter how many times I disagreed with Chavez, no matter how wrong I felt her ideas could be at times, no matter how frustrated I got with her, she should be speaking as if she owns the world. She absolutely gets credit for speaking confidently and with authority. Why half-ass this? My primary compliment to this book is that it is simply impossible not to respect Chavez, no matter how grudgingly you do it, because here is a woman of color who really believes in what she’s saying and is speaking from a position of total surety. That needs to be kept in mind while I run through my myriad complaints.
  
  “Myriad complaints?” Well, first of all, I need to be honest: I decided to read this book because a teacher of mine was using methods from it in class, and they were not working. Specifically, my teacher attempted to integrate Liz Lehrman’s Critical Response Process, which students inevitably deviated from whenever they were given a chance—everyone, students of color included, seemed to agree that it was confusing and not in their personal best interests, and they wound up creating their own workshop structures instead.
  
  Imagine my frustration when Chavez wrote, “My own students occasionally express opposition to the antiracist workshop model. They… complain that their peers are “too nice.” They want instead for their classmates to “be real,” to “be harsh,” to “tear the work apart” because they can “take it.” These students, in my experience, are always privileged white males. Every single time.”
  
  None of the reviews here discuss personal experience with the strategies described in this book, so here’s mine: this hurt to read. It was genuinely painful to see my perspective dismissed because it was seemingly shared by “privileged” (I hate this word. Can we retire it? Everyone is privileged in some ways [see later criticisms in this review]; just say “cishet” or “abled” or “upper-class” or whatever it is you actually mean) white men.
  
  As someone who did feel this workshop process was unhelpful, I recall coming to my professor with emails that took me hours to write, expressing how I felt that critique was holding people back from saying their honest feelings, and how I wanted to know how my audience really responded, and felt at a disadvantage as a minority writer hoping to get very certain reactions (entertainment, understanding, etc) from my work. I was happy to be respected, and trusted my peers—all students I liked, whom I’d had good conversations with—to show me kindness in honesty, without the barriers of “neutral questions” and asking permission for opinions.
  
  “[White male students] want to compete in workshop,” Chavez continues. “[T]hey want to win workshop. Without acknowledging, of course, that the game is rigged, that they won at the get-go, regardless of their writing ability. This colosseum mentality of brutality and bloodshed is a farce, one that blinds them to the advantage of collaborative creation.”
  
  So what does it mean when I, as a Jewish LGBT writer, want honest opinions on my work even from people who have never heard of they/them pronouns before? What does it mean when I respect my classmates enough to field any of their queries, any of their concerns, to decide for myself how to respond to each individual statement? What if, in my collaboration with less-aware but well-meaning writers, I don’t want this structure?
  
  To her credit, Chavez admits “my sampling pool might be skewed (I teach at a prestigious private college in Colorado)”... right before making this big general statement about white men anyhow. Let’s be clear: I’m not here to defend white men. Do white men have this attitude? Absolutely. Do white men ruin workshops over this? 100%. But it is frustrating, as a writer in the demographic Chavez is seemingly trying to help, to feel so spoken over, flattened, and ignored.
  
  This is simply one close reading in a book that raises many more serious questions.
  
  Chavez rightfully critiques the “banking system” of education, in which students are expected to passively receive “deposits” of information, which they swallow without comment, from their (usually white and male) professors. Another great point—this is certainly the case the majority of the time.
  
  However, Chavez fails to address the implications of her ideas here. I wish she’d gone into more detail about the value of mentors of color (particularly since she cites one of her own, another Chicana author named Ana Castillo), how taking in knowledge from them can be helpful and part of a long tradition of mentorship in non-Western cultures. Isn’t this how we preserve our cultures? And what of the white students who could stand to learn so much from shutting up and listening to a person of color for once? No, the "banking system" is only discussed with regards to the assumed white mentors that Chavez assumes everyone is experiencing everywhere.
  
  And, secondarily… should Chavez, too, not be questioned? Is writing a book on How To Teach (because Chavez does seem to pose her way as the only correct way to teach an anti-racist creative writing classroom) not placing oneself as an authority, too? This is of course quite different, but there are places when Chavez mentions student pushback, and she’s pretty serious about it: “It’s not easy to adapt our creative and cultural heritage. It will likely feel uncomfortable at first, for both you and your students… Maybe your students inadvertently misstep the course of action and want to revert to the traditional model. Stick with it. Don’t give in. To give in is to devolve.”
  
  But is it fair to pose Chavez as authority on the correct workshop structure above the students? Above the teacher in the classroom? At times, it does seem that Chavez is reinstating a new authority, rather than recognizing that there can be no one authority, because no one is of every relevant experience, and that what we really need are diverse mentors of all backgrounds who can play to their backgrounds as strengths in teaching. It made it, honestly, quite an odd book to read, because Chavez often seemed to assume that even the teacher reading her book would be white, and thus wrote 'down' instead of writing a genuine, open text to all teachers, and perhaps directing specifics to one or another group. This makes it feel quite pessimistic.
  
  “It wasn’t uncommon for… students to drink alcohol before or cry after a workshop as a means of self-soothing,” Chavez writes, but good Lord, why? If a student is experiencing addiction problems, is the solution really to implement a change in workshop? It was this line which tipped me off to the fact that Chavez might genuinely be writing in an alternate universe from me. While I won’t pretend I know how everyone in my workshops has felt before and after, this is not remotely normal… and it raises the question of whether we should upend the entire system because in one university there are students who are having serious depression issues.
  
  What’s even odder is that Chavez isn’t half as accepting of mental health issues elsewhere in her book. She writes of an attendance policy (Miss one day of class, and your final grade will decrease by one half letter grade; arrive late to class four times, and your final grade will decrease by one half letter grade; miss workshop, and you risk failure) which “well-meaning colleagues have criticized… as unnecessarily harsh and unrealistic.” Chavez justifies this: “Life is a
  series of conspiracies to keep us from [writing]. …Read “final grade” as “commitment to your creative power.”” She acknowledges that she receives requests each semester to “pardon students’ “special” circumstances.”
  
  “At the predominantly white liberal arts college where I work,” she writes, “this means an athlete’s away games, a family vacation abroad, a great aunt’s birthday celebration, a camping trip, a concert. Sometimes it’s acute anxiety or depression. I make it clear to these students that my attendance policy is firm. As artists we evolve season by season, some of which are more
  conducive to a daily writing commitment than others. If it’s not time, don’t force it, I tell
  them, because forcing it is missing it.”
  
  Well, good for her, but that means that students are missing it. I’m not saying that a firm attendance policy can’t be good—though I’m not totally on board—but this is pretty contradictory, isn’t it? Chavez notes in passing that some students have, indeed, passed on the workshop due to this policy and enrolled later. It’s a little silly, in my opinion, to admit that you work in a mostly-white college… and then claim that this policy is specifically good for writers of color. How does she know that?
  
  This is, of course, also silly when you consider her response to students who want workshops like “real life” (which I agree is stupid). Why are we all of a sudden trying to mimic the inherent inequalities of real life? And not even accurately, might I add—there’s nothing stopping you from being both a writer and a college athlete, because writing does not exist in a block schedule. It’s ridiculous to stand by this policy as reflective of “real life” as students are forced by Chavez to turn away from the course and real-life authors are writing at 5:00 AM, 3:00 AM, in cars picking up children from soccer, and in the bathroom on their work breaks. There’s almost no correlation at all between this strict schedule and the real life of a writer, so why pretend that there is?
  
  I mean, hell, Chavez only allows critiquers to respond to a piece on the spot, after hearing it read (reading along) once! What about people who can’t pay attention to a piece when it’s being read? What about auditory processing issues? What about people who, I don’t know, need a minute to think after experiencing a piece of art? This is just blatantly a barrier to disabled/neurodivergent students, and it’s frustrating that Chavez never considers these things. I shivered when reading about how Chavez encourages students to cry and demands acceptance of it, because many people don't want to hear other people crying not from some lack of empathy but for a variety of complex reasons, and once again I could feel Chavez talking over my head.
  
  But you know what? I simply go to a different university from the one Chavez is teaching at. I trust my fellow students (who are still certainly majority white, but not generally upper class), and when we workshopped together, I never once saw these deranged examples that Chavez gives, of white male students waving their arms and decrying incidents of racism in fiction as “unrealistic”. I workshopped LGBT pieces, with identities people had never even heard of, and watched as my workshopmates worked to understand what they were reading, and to dialogue with me on their reactions and experiences. I don’t think the cure is some kind of magical new workshop dialogue—I think the cure is loving and caring for each other, to the point that we are aware of how we can play into bigotry and are prepared to be told “that is not acceptable.” I have experienced that where I am at, in a relatively small program in a leftist area. I understand 100% that Chavez has not, at her prestigious university. This creates a lot of blind spots in her instruction, in my opinion. Here I’ll just quote from AJ Nolan’s review, because I think they summed it up best:
  
  I also wish she would have acknowledged her privilege of her position as the Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College, where I imagine she likely teaches a 2-2 or even 1-1 load, or the equivalent thereof with CC's Block system. Which is good, but it made it harder to imagine my adapting her techniques when I don't know if she was managing them with a student load of 20 or a load of 100 students, and also how many students she considered to be a workshop. In my university, we have 20 students in our undergraduate workshop, with no exceptions. And I teach a 4-4 load, usually with 3 different preps each semester. And rather than working in a private college with 2000 students, I teach in a public university with 25,000 students, a large portion of whom are POC and first generation students with little ability to afford to print as much as she recommends (nor does the university budget provide for faculty to print that much). So while I value the book for being anti-racist, and I absolutely am incorporating a lot of her ideas, the lack of either acknowledgement or awareness of difference in faculty's loads and circumstances, and of public university student's differing experiences, was a little off putting.
  
  That was a really important element to me. I see how and why Chavez’s methods work for her, but they were impossible to fully enact for the teacher who used just Critical Response Process in our class, who wound up not having (eg) pre- and post-workshop meetings. I highly value these, and would have loved them, but I understood that my teacher simply didn’t have the time for that with her courseload and salary. There needs to be room for other circumstances in this book, and Chavez doesn’t seem to acknowledge that. At that point, if we’re expecting professors to spend all this time and for students to have the free time and schedules and printers to support all this… why don’t we take the leap and just imagine a world in which professors AREN’T uniformly white?
  
  It is now time for you to scroll back up and re-read the first paragraph if you need a reminder of why I'm still rating this book four stars. I am, in some circles, considered white, and I'm not opposed to being made uncomfortable in the general discussion of race. It really is not always about me.
  
  Still, what with the potentially conflicting messaging, the extremely strict and binary methodology Chavez offers, and the lack of acknowledgement of other potential circumstances, I personally found this book a little frustrating to read and attempt to apply. However, I did absolutely find a lot helpful in it, and wound up writing tons of things down and utilizing all sorts of suggestions in my own writing life. It’s not, ultimately, not worth reading—and I have recommended it, just as I do books like
  Save the Cat!, which are flawed but compulsively readable and ultimately nonetheless instructional.
• 
  Tomasen Carey

  BEST professional book I have read in eons! A MUST read for all.
• 
  Marianne

  Succinct, lyrical, inspiring. A brilliant and convincing book whether or not you are currently teaching. I loved reading it and had trouble stopping in the middle at bedtime.
  
  (Full disclosure, the author was a colleague of mine and while we've never known each other at all well, lots of my student workers took and loved her classes - so I went into this book with so much pre existing enthusiasm! All of it merited, high hopes surpassed.)
  
  PS I have some opinions about how adapting some of the concrete details of this approach could make it more accessible for people who have a wide range of disabilities, as well as making a more inclusive first impression on disabled folks from the get-go, but the author was laser focused on anti racism specifically so I get why she didn't address that more than passingly here. It's just that I'm currently too disabled to work and I have background in disability accommodations, so I think a lot about these things. So much is utterly splendid about this book that I had Room to think about those things, which is far from a given in books about teaching.
• 
  lucy

  i teach middle school english and wasn’t sure how much i would get from this book. after reading it, i think it should be required reading for all teachers and writers! chavez does such a beautiful job weaving together ideas from education, creative practice, and mindfulness to outline her workshop process. lots of good concrete ideas to try AND larger abstract concepts to think about - truly anyone could find something worth taking away from this book. i’m passing it off to a coworker and returning to school excited about the possibilities.
• 
  Marika Gillis

  A couple of summers ago, I read the book "How to Be an Anti-racist." In the book, the author, Kendi, poses a question that has stuck with me. He asks, "What if we measured intelligence by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environments?" The Anti-racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez teaches us how to do this- how to help students understand (and express) their own reality and grow intellectually from it.
  
  I heard about this book in a meeting I attended for work. It's target audience is educators in higher education, but I was surprised how much new knowledge I was still able to walk away with. And so many great ideas!
  
  I'm going to start by sharing what Chavez states educators should *not* do if they want to foster an anti-racist writing classroom. To begin, educators should release control over the way writing should sound. Students, in general, should never be asked to imitate another's writing style, and this is especially true when it is a student of color who is being asked to imitate a white person's writing. Secondly, educators need to remove the word 'master' when they refer to writers they are studying in class. Additionally, Chavez writes a lot about the traditional college-level format for a writing workshop, which includes peer critique. In the traditional writing workshop format, the author is silent while classmates critique their work. Chavez asks educators to consider what it means to silence people of color during critique. Instead we should bring the writer into the work of critiquing by asking them what kind of feedback they want. This forces them to reflect on their writing process. Instead of sitting silently for critique, she has students lead the conferences. She guides them, but students have the control. Again, this pushes them to be active participants.
  
  Chavez uses lots of specific examples from her own life experience to share her knowledge on how to combat racism in writing instruction, and her ideas could be applied in classrooms at lower levels. To begin, she encourages us to let students choose the canon of literature to study. She has her students perform their work publicly and when she teaches voice, she is careful to recognize that the voice of one race might sound very different than the voice of another so she asks her student to reflects on "what is voice to you?" Of note is an idea Chavez shared in chapter three. She encourages her students to write by hand to "capitalize on the kinetic link between brain stem, spinal cord, and fingers... Workshop participants feel the words move across the page..." Also, Chavez is a fan of timed freewrites. She compares them to push-ups as a way to remind students that writing is a skill that improves with frequency, and she believes that freewrites heighten access to images and emotions that are otherwise inaccessible to the conscious mind.
  
  Chavez believes strongly in humanizing learning. "Why does emotional care undermine academic growth?" is one of the first questions she addresses early in the book. One of my favorite ideas she presented had students honor their mentor writers by researching a family tree of mentors to look for the writers, musicians, songwriters, and filmmakers that students come from.
  
  I highly recommend this book to all educators who teach students how to write. This is a great resource and there are even sample lesson plans at the end of the book.
  
  (Interestingly, Felicia Rose Chavez spent time locally at Colorado College.)
• 
  Jessica

  Felicia Rose Chavez's book is nothing short of a complete revelation. I requested that the book be purchased with department funds in an effort to seek out more (better?) information on how to not only diversify course readings, but to actively make my creative writing workshops anti-racist. I wasn't entirely sure where to begin, but Chavez took me by the proverbial hand and presented a digestible overview of how to do just that.
  
  I found myself questioning how I'd run workshops all along. Not only was I doing a disservice to my marginalized students (mostly BIPOC), but I was also doing a disservice to myself in the amount of work I was putting on my own plate. My students didn't need me to tell them what to do. They needed to express their vision, their creative impulse, and simply write.
  
  I will, from now on, serve as a presence in the room - a person ready to give advice when asked, but more importantly, to listen as my students learn and grow as writers.
  
  Felicia, I'm ready to build this thing together.
• 
  Anju 杏樹

  I don't teach creative writing nor do I really have access to the writing workshop rooms practiced in Anglophone spaces.
  
  But I DO think of how we talk and teach ourselves, offline or online as writers, how we talk about craft, how to engage in it and, above all, how to critique it.
  
  I'd say this is a great read for writers too: Have a look at what Chavez has to say about how we can treat each others' voices and words.
  
  Perhaps there is a way through respect without needing to "take it" or "give it"; to value the creative vision and intents of the creator and not solely behold them to our, most probably flawed and inevitably biased, ideas of how to tell their own stories.
  
  (As a closing thought, the book is also rife with dozens of little prompts and ideas for creative self-development which I think, any kind of writer could want to try out. Self-development and self-acutalisation lead, after all, to even better, more fulfilling craft and fiction, I think)
• 
  Brian Kinsella

  Loved it. This might be my new favorite book on teaching writing. This book gave me a lot of new focus points for how I want to setup my classes for next year. Most of it is focused in a college classroom, but there is just so much great info and ideas here that can help high school on down. It was also great getting to see how past experiences have informed her current pedagogy, and how she makes it clear that she is still learning and changing. Definitely recommend!
• 
  Alissa Hattman

  Chavez presents a model for writing workshop that seeks to replace white-centered, patriarchal teaching techniques with a more inclusive model that platforms students of color. She writes about ways to decolonize the classroom by instituting writing rituals, owning the language of craft, and offering a new canon. Chavez provides examples of assignments and lesson plans for elevating students’ cultural capital and empowering student writers. Chapters six, “Teaching Writers to Workshop” was particularly helpful in considering alternate models (such as the Liz Lerman Critical Response Process) for peer review.