VOICES is a digital, student-led publication at Morehouse College that showcases the rhetorical choices African American men in an HBCU setting make in communicating issues of importance to them. I believe that activism, like leadership, begins at home. For these Morehouse College students, activism and leadership begin at “The House,” inside the Composition Classroom, where these young men engage in the writing process—from brainstorming to outlining, to drafting, to peer review and revision, and ultimately to publishing their work. From their choice of photos to the essays, short stories, poetry, and sketches they chose to include in this publication, VOICES shows how writing communities foster confidence, nurture scholarship, and provide a positive space for Black male voices, which is where Black activism ultimately begins.

In the fall of 2014, Troy University partnered with the Alabama Humanities Foundation, working in conjunction with the Maine Humanities Council, to provide a veterans’ reading group to wounded warriors at the Warrior Transition Battalion at Fort Benning, GA. The program, Story Swap: Literature and the Veteran Experience, consisted of five, ten-week sessions. During weekly meetings, veterans came together to share dinner and swap stories. While reading and discussing short stories, novels, poetry, essays, and art, the veterans learned much about each other and themselves. In this article, Paige Paquette, an assistant professor of English and the group facilitator, will discuss her involvement in the planning and implementation of the program. Six of the participating veterans will share their experiences in a literary program that allowed them to realize they all have a story worth telling.

This article considers the value of young adult literature in the literacy development of adolescents. Her account of an out-of-school reading group for adolescent African American girls illustrates the capacity such spaces have to provide young African American women with opportunities for self-reflection, critical inquiry, and personal development, opportunities that may not exist within the traditional classroom setting. Melvin-Davis contends that reading groups, such as these, function as “homeplaces,” spaces where diverse, relevant, and realistic African American experiences are shared, validated, and explored for the insights they might reveal for negotiating the world.

This article examines Alexander’s experiences teaching literacy and African American Literature to prison inmates at the Orange County Correctional facility in Hillsborough, North Carolina. For Alexander the conversations and insights provided by these inmates about their experiences and the experiences of the writers they read were indeed emancipatory. As Alexander explains, the process of reading and discussing the works of African American writers can provide a critical lens for understanding one’s own subjugation, and participates in a long tradition of African American community literacy by helping to transform the lives and minds of a population disproportionately comprised of people of color.

During the spring of 2003, I made three trips to the New Jersey State Prison to observe and participate in the prison literacy program run by the grassroots humanities group “People and Stories.” In the course of these visits, I bore witness to the power of short stories in bringing forth the emotions and personal responses of what is likely New Jersey’s most emotionally repressed population. Gradually, the stereotypes and fears I held about prisoners began to dissolve as the time spent with these men revealed their deep humanity.