Our wildly diverse country contains multitudes-wanderers and drifters, exiles and refugees, boundary defenders and border-crossers, nomads and immigrants, Underground Railroaders and long-haul riders, free-thinkers and rule-followers. No single story can say it all, for we are people who speak with many tongues, and who refuse to stand still-we’re on the move, on the run, and in the mix, our collective experiences united in motion. Critical Process Writing begins here, for Brett Blake understands that no one is literally voiceless, although too many (massively and tragically in American schools) are savagely silenced or heartlessly unheard. Dr. Blake illuminates a sturdy antidote-literacy practices that are collaborative, social, and critical, geared toward co-creating (teacher and student together) a relationship that reveals a wide universe of meaning-making. The result: the poetry of the everyday, the literature of the street, and an authentic encounter in which a teacher, listening with empathy and identification, and a student, seizing an occasion to perform an account of events and experiences, become both more literate and more powerful and intentional in their projects and their pursuits. Critical Process Writing is an indispensable book.

Bill Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago