The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop:
How to Decolonize The Creative Classroom
Felicia Rose Chavez

The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom is a groundbreaking approach to teaching a writing workshop by Colorado College educator Felicia Rose Chavez. This innovative book centers a new methodology for the writing workshop that aims to deconstruct biases to “achieve a cultural shift in perspective, create “democratic learning spaces,” and recruit and nourish BIPOC students in order to give them their own agency. 
 
Chavez, a first-generation college student, briefly attended Wellesley College before returning home to Albuquerque, New Mexico. In the interim between leaving Wellesley and starting DePaul University, she worked in Chicago as an AmeriCorps teacher and then as an educator for the Young Chicago Authors (YCA). In those early teaching experiences, the author learned a dialogue-based educational approach (later recognized formally as “culturally relevant teaching”) that laid the groundwork for the anti-racist writing workshop. Chavez herself experienced the stultifying effects of traditional creative writing workshops based on dominance and control that centered “whiteness” (workshop leaders, canonical white authors, and predominantly white workshop participants).  As a result, the anti-racist writing workshop model she developed upends this traditional approach by stressing craft, reading from a “living archive of multicultural texts,” and a emphasizing a critical response-based model.

This paradigm-shifting book is a real game changer for writing workshops everywhere. Its value lies in democratizing the hallowed writers’ workshop where canonical authors read for the sake of emulation are replaced with an emphasis on craft (voice, imagery, characterization, and arrangement) and the integration of diverse authors.  The book provides invaluable insight for educators, students, and writers alike but will invigorate emergent BIPOC writers, in particular.
 
Felicia Rose Chavez received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She has been the recipient of numerous teaching awards and is the scholar-in-residence at Colorado College. She is the coeditor of LatiNext: The Break Beat Poets Vol. 4.
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The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a publication by Haymarket Books and can be purchased online at HaymakertBooks.org. 
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Reviewed by
Marian Perales
​​2/18/2021

Marian Perales, an editor and historian, received her M.A. in Chicanx history from the Claremont Graduate University. She is an avid reader and book reviewer of BIPOC histories and literature. 
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