Racial Shorthand disrupts the dominant shorthand by demonstrating how communities of color produce multimodal projects and leverage the affordances of social media in ways that extend the rhetorical traditions and literacy practices of these communities.

John Trimbur's much-cited 1991 essay, "Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis," persuasively argues for a view of literacy crisis discourse as "always strategic," and demonstrates the ways in which it has reified "the meritocratic educational order" (285-286). This project considers Trimbur's argument close to 25 years later, examining twenty-first century literacy crisis discourses immersed inextricably in a technological age. The notion of literacy crisis is a popular trope in the field of composition, rhetoric and literacy studies. Scholars such as Bronwyn T. Williams, Michele Knobel, Colin Lankshear, James Paul Gee, Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail Hawisher among many others have developed innovative heuristics in order to understand the nature of literacy learning in a digital age and enrich readers' understanding of the epistemologies underlying new literacy practices. However, this innovative book project considers the ways in which literacy crisis discourses have reinvented themselves in the twenty-first century through a richly textured view of these varied discourses.

Stories That Speak to Us —a digital collection of scholarly, curated exhibits—is designed to investigate literacy narratives from a number of perspectives: to explore why they are important, what information they carry about reading and composing, why they might be valuable, not only for scholars and teachers, but also for librarians, community literacy workers, individual citizens and groups of people. As the editors and authors collectively suggest, literacy narratives are powerfully rhetorical linguistic accounts through which people fashion their lives; make sense of their world, indeed construct the realities in which they live.