Writing on the Move - (Composition, Literacy, and Culture) by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard (Paperback)

About the Book

Winner of the 2019 CCCC Outstanding Book Award. Lorimer Leonard shows how multilingual migrant women both succeed and struggle in their writing contexts. Based on a qualitative study of everyday multilingual writers in the United States, she shows how migrants' literacies are revalued because they move with writers among their different languages and around the world. The book details the complicated reality of multilingual literacy, which is lived at the nexus of prejudice, prestige, and power.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2019 CCCC Outstanding Book Award.

In this book, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard shows how multilingual migrant women both succeed and struggle in their writing contexts. Based on a qualitative study of everyday multilingual writers in the United States, she shows how migrants' literacies are revalued because they move with writers among their different languages and around the world. Writing on the Move builds a theory of literate valuation, in which socioeconomic values shape how multilingual migrant writers do or do not move forward in their lives. The book details the complicated reality of multilingual literacy, which is lived at the nexus of prejudice, prestige, and power.

Review Quotes

Writing on the Move is an important contribution to transnational literacy studies. It not only complicates our understanding of literate repertoires performed in everyday life by migrant women with rich and resonant lives; it also extends our vocabulary of motive by critically examining how fixity, friction, and fluidity inform their literate values. A must-read in a time of great peril for immigrants in the United States.-- "Juan C. Guerra, University of Washington at Seattle"

How is literacy revalued as it moves across borders and boundaries? What forms does literate mobility take? What functions does the process of literate valuation perform? Refreshingly insightful and profoundly original, Writing on the Move offers an indispensable framework for theorizing about these questions and for understanding how competing social and economic forces shape, recognize, and regulate migrant literate lives.-- "LuMing Mao, Miami University"

About the Author

Rebecca Lorimer Leonard is assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.