This essay presents a polyvocal review of the 2019 Conference on Community Writing. It is composed of a series of vignettes and reflections written by the authors, community partners, conference organizers, educators, and others who attended the conference. Together, these reflections examine a central theme of the conference, “the work” of community writing, by attending to four questions: 1) What is the work of the Conference on Community Writing, and what does it tell us about the state of the subfield of community-engaged writing?; 2) What spaces does the conference encompass, and who is included in these spaces?; 3) What are the material realities that enable and constrain our work, in and beyond the conference?; and 4) What work is unfinished, and what will sustain us as we tackle it? The polyvocal essay presented here examines these questions through multiple positionalities within community writing studies, ultimately arguing that attending to the diversity of voices, stories, and perspectives in community writing must guide our efforts to understand community writing as a field and imagine its future work.

The emotional dynamics for community members involved in university-community partnerships remain untheorized and often unrecognized. This article explores the fear minoritized high school students expressed about working with college composition students, offering suggestions for how composition teachers can use the strategies of personalismo, affirmation, rigor, and role fluidity to create more responsive community partnerships. Grounded in insights from community partners, the study suggests that knowledge making might change in community-based pedagogies if dominant epistemologies can shift to understand community members as producers of knowledge.