Acknowledgments

Acknowledgment and sincere thanks must go to Sonia Zyngier and Joanna Gavins for their editorial labor on this book. A sign of a great editor is when comments help a writer not only improve a manuscript but improve as a communicator. Thank you for the help, patience, and chance to improve.

The inspiration from the work of my mentor David Hanauer has to be acknowledged as well. Everything here grew from my reading of his scholarship on meaningful literacy, project ownership, and poetic (auto) ethnography – which so many of my friends, previous classmates, and colleagues have gravitated toward.

Special recognition also goes to Fang-Yu Liao, who cooperatively coded data with me, especially the meaningful literacy aspects codebook used in the systematic review of the evidence that forms the core of this book. Thanks are also due to Roger Powell for help developing the codebook, looking especially at comprehensibility and applicability.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the hundreds of students I have been fortunate enough to have in classes, who have worked through creative writing assignments in sometimes surprising contexts, as well as my institution, the University of Wisconsin-Stout.