Writing Youth

Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English and director of the Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication at University of California, Irvine.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Writing (about) YouthChapter One—Literacy’s Hunger Games: Branding MultiliteracyChapter Two—The Darker Side of the Sorting Hat: Representations of Educational Testing in Dystopian Young Adult Fiction, by Jonathan Alexander and Rebecca BlackChapter Three—Beyond The Hunger Games: Becoming CollaborativeChapter Four—Kids in the Aftermath: The Politics of Hurricane Katrina in Young Adult FictionChapter Five—Sponsoring Homonormativity: Sexual Literacies in Queer YA Literature, by William P. Banks and Jonathan AlexanderChapter Six—Seizing the Means of Production, Sort Of: YA Self-Sponsored MultimediaVideos DiscussedBibliographyAbout the Author

Overall, Writing Youth is extremely valuable in that it explicitly recognizes young adult fiction as embedded within a wider cultural media context in which young people are not merely passive consumers, but are actively engaged and agential. Alexander's concept of literacy sponsorship has wide-reaching implications not only for literary critics but also for educators and publishers.