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Using Octavia Butler's prophetic writing, specifically, passages from her "Parable" series, as a conceptual lens, this article will explore the ways one Black girl uses multimodal literacies to imagine new worlds that center and celebrate her Black girlhood. An exploration of her multimodal literacies shows how she simultaneously confronts reality, what exists under this earthly sun, and, in turn, also imagines and shares a new world, under a new sun, built for and by Black girls. This article builds on data collected from a practitioner research study of writing collaborative for girls of Color and applies feminist of Color analyses to create a narrative portrait that explores Black girl literacies as portals to new suns.

This article resulted from an American Education Research Association (AERA) conference presentation that consisted of a dialogue between three scholar-siblings of color who use methodological pathways that intentionally center relationality, mutuality, and care in educational research. The authors do this work understanding that familial ways of knowing and being are resources that contribute to the survival and thriving of BIPOC communities in the face of white supremacist structures. The authors' conversation discusses how they disrupt the white western gaze by relying on the critical mass of Black, Indigenous, and other scholars of color who refuse exploitive methods and, instead, charted new methodological pathways that (re)center cultural, familial, and tribal ways of knowing. Given the authors' positionalities, the communities and families that collectively raised them, and the extended scholarly family who have nurtured and supported them in their efforts to push against extractive research practices, the authors attend to the ways knowledge is shaped at the intersections of race and gender. This dialogue contends that there are sophisticated knowledges, ways of knowing, and ways of being rooted in the experience of marginalized families caring for one another and fighting for each other's rights.

Through an exploration of an afterschool writing club for middle school girls of Color (GOC), this article puts forth the argument that GOC consistently leverage incisive critiques of schooling through multiple literacies, including embodied and experiential ways of knowing and communicating. However, oftentimes, these critiques are ignored because their literacies are marginalized, ignored, and misread. As informed by their lived and felt experiences, it becomes apparent how school has failed them and how they continue to persist in their learning, their work, and their building toward the futures they deserve and desire, sometimes in ways that are recognized by schools, sometimes in resistance to school standards. Further, the article puts forth a model of what education can look like when GOC multiple literacies are centered and celebrated. Educators, researchers, and policy makers must understand GOC as hopeful and desiring learners and create spaces that honor and respect their multifaceted literacies.

This article narrates the contours of a digital "kitchen table talk"--a conversation that brought together WoC from various areas of literacy and language education to discuss the state of the field and the next steps in transforming literacy studies and education for GFoC. Using bell hooks's concept of "homeplace," we bring together the reflections of eleven WoC across intersected Black, Latina, and Asian identities to examine the realities of GFoC, the urgency around their lives and needs, as well as self-examination of our role in the academy taking up feminist projects with GFoC.

This article investigates how playwriting served three middle school Black girls within a larger practitioner research study seeking to better understand the literate practices of girls of color. It delves into the ways that playwriting provided the girls in an afterschool writing club opportunities to explore both their knowledge and ways of knowing, rooted in their cultural, gendered, and racialized experiences, and, in turn, share these with others, within an academic setting. It points to the necessity for creating writing pedagogies that celebrate experiential, cultural, emotional, and relational knowledge, using playwriting as an example.

In this article, I use narrative portraiture as a methodology to inquire into the ways that two Asian American (AsAm) girls used their time in an after-school writing collaborative for girls of Color to explore and express their identities and political commitments through multiple literacies. Building on theoretical foundations of AsianCrit, women of Color, and AsAm feminisms, and sociocultural understandings of literacies, I argue against the flattening of AsAm girlhood, rooted in the harmful intersection of sexism and stereotypes such as the model minority and forever foreigner tropes. Three learnings emerged from this study: (1) AsAm girls' relational literacies are used to explore and express AsAm girlhood, (2) AsAm girls use multimodal literacies to inquire into and story their identities in ways that resist dominant definitions of AsAm girlhood, and (3) AsAm girls are holders of emerging political identities that can be supported through supportive literacy curriculum. The work of the girls featured in this article has important implications for the ways the field understands AsAm girlhood and AsAm girl literacies. I put forth a necessary call for more AsAm feminist scholars to work alongside AsAm girls to create richer understandings of their needs and desires and how we might support them through literacy pedagogies.

This introduction to a special issue on Girl of Color literacies explores the editors' purpose for creating the issue. Utilizing sociocultural definitions of literacy nuanced and bolstered by Women of Color theories of language and literacy, they establish an urgency to pursue research that is conducted with and for Girls of Color within the field of literacy. The editors articulate the goals of the special issue as well as provide proposed lines of inquiry the field must address to create research, pedagogies, and practices that are more loving toward Girls of Color and that honor their beautifully complex meaning-making practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article narrates the contours of a digital "kitchen table talk"–a conversation that brought together WoC from various areas of literacy and language education to discuss the state of the field and the next steps in transforming literacy studies and education for GFoC. Using bell hooks's concept of "homeplace," we bring together the reflections of eleven WoC across intersected Black, Latina, and Asian identities to examine the realities of GFoC, the urgency around their lives and needs, as well as self-examination of our role in the academy taking up feminist projects with GFoC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will explore what I have conceptualized as critical celebration within an afterschool writing club for and with Girls of Color (GOC). Using a feminist of color theoretical framework and building upon existing literature about GOC and their writing practices, critical celebration will be defined as a lens used to view GOC as important, dynamic, and brilliant in the face of an overabundance of deficitizing narratives and erasure, and to also open opportunities for girls to view the experiences and identities of GOC like them and unlike them as important sources of knowledge as they develop critical insights toward solidarity across difference. Using this definition, I will then describe the ways the feminist of color writing pedagogy engaged in this group made space for critical celebration of and by GOC, thereby offering important implications for justice-oriented literacy education, not only for GOC, but for all students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This column examines the possibilities and critiques of human rights thinking and its implications for literacy and participatory research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]