One autumn day, I was driving my daughter Grace to a figure-skating lesson in Omaha. The journey would consume most of an hour and I was using the time to think about the keynote address I was scheduled to deliver at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing. The conference was less than a month away and I was stuck for words. So I was thinking, hard, and quite honestly I was going around in circles in my head when Grace piped up from the backseat. “Mommy, want to hear the song I learned today in music class?” “Sure,”...

“I wonder,” says my colleague, “if I could ask you a question.” We are sitting in a restaurant booth in the Midwest. I’ve been invited here to offer a workshop on antiracism. Our conversation had wound slowly to this moment, my colleague telling me a little of her childhood, her experience of being a light-skinned Latina woman in a family that prized light skin ever so highly; about a father who hated Mexicans, who maybe hated himself. About her children and their schools. About her work at the university. “I wonder if I could ask you a question? I think...

The last time I tried to save my brother I drove from Minnesota to Wisconsin on a gray February day. The snow lay in dirty piles along the roadside and my car plowed dutifully through the slush that covered the tarmac. I was feeling good. This time I had a plan. I had been dispatched by my family innumerable times to extract my brother from trouble, but always before these journeys had been adrenaline-filled flights borne of crisis, with little or no planning preceding them.

When we were still young and innocent, I was sent to convince my brother that...

Performative antiracism engages actors in forms of individual and individualized resistance—in work at the interior of one’s self and one’s affiliative relations with others. But performative antiracism demands more of us than this. Performative antiracism is labor that undoes the distinctions between personal and institutional, or systemic-change work. Antiracist actors work toward this undoing by uncovering and examining the living connective tissue between the ideas we hold—ideas that delineate the shape and quality of our relations—and ideas that delineate the deep or hidden racialized missions, structures, and practices of the systems, institutions, and social groups that enable...

In the fall of 2009, the Midwest Writing Centers Association held its annual conference in Rapid City, South Dakota. I chose to drive to the meeting rather than fly, and I chose to drive alone rather than traveling with consultants from the UNL Writing Center who were taking a school van. I wanted to see more of Nebraska than would be available to me from the window of an airplane or from a van window as it hurtled along the interstate. I wanted to drive through the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, about which I had read a great deal....

The following chapter began with the exchange of letters written between November 2010 and late January 2011 between Vershawn Ashanti Young and me. Vershawn and I met in Chicago one winter at a conference on race and writing centers at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Probably, you too have had the experience of meeting someone and having the sense that you have been given, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the gift of a chance meeting—an opportunity for a friendship deep and kind and challenging in the best sense.

Friendships require work, and, in truth, the work of friendship, like the work...

Years ago, Elizabeth Boquet was the keynote speaker at a National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing held in Lawrence, Kansas. The conference organizers had arranged a band for the conference reception. During one of their sets, Beth stepped up to the microphone, and to the band’s accompaniment sang an extraordinarily beautiful rendition of Curtis Mayfield’s song, “People Get Ready.”

People get ready, there’s a train a comin’

You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board

All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin’

Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord

People get ready...