What people are saying.

“Every writing teacher on Earth needs this book."

—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“This book is fire. This book is a devotion. 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

"‘Dismantle’ has become a trendy word in our current historical moment. We use it, but don't really know how to dismantle. Felicia Rose Chavez personifies the word. True to the adage, she shows us, doesn't tell us. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a vital book. 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. Word to everything I love.”
— Willie Perdomo, author of The Crazy Bunch

“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. Felicia Rose Chavez has skillfully and lovingly done all three in a book that will transform how we write to create an anti-racist world. The writing rituals, questions to push anti-racist thinking, and explanation on how we complete the literary canon will leave the reader with the necessary tools to become a teacher who is building a new world. 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

"'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. She expertly outlines the steps to produce a nurturing, collaborative, inclusive space for BIPOC writers where the core tenets are about emotional recognition, writing rituals, representative reading lists, and fully collaborative workshops where no one is silenced. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop breaks down how a universal acclimation to inherently racist practices in workshops has stifled and harmed students of color. Chavez shares a methodology that is pure, enlightened, encouraging, and productive, allowing creators of color to understand their value and potential. As an author, editor, and teacher I found myself wholly changed by The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop and will be implementing much of this thinking and these actions to facilitate more accountability and unity within the workshop environment."
—Jennifer Baker, editor of Everyday People: The Color of Life—A Short Story Anthology

“The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is an intelligent and necessary rethinking of the creative writing workshop. It provides a map to diversify the workshop and its aesthetics, to restructure its power dynamics and to align the process of critique more with basic principles of creativity and psychology. We’re in a profound cultural and political shift now around race, and Felicia Rose Chavez’s book will aid others on that path.”
—David Mura, author of A Stranger’s Journey