Writing on the Move: Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy

Winner, 2019 CCCC Outstanding Book Award

Honorable Mention, 2018 Coalition of the Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition Winifred Bryan Horner 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.