Interview: Victor Villanueva, Washington State University by Brian Bailie, Collette Caton, Rachael Shapiro

Victor Villanueva studies the intersections of rhetoric and racism. He is the recipient of the 2009 CCCC Exemplar Award, which honors scholars whose work represents the best our field has to offer. Villanueva also won NCTE’s David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English and CEE’s Richard Meade Award for Research in English Education for his book, Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, an autobiographical tale that exposes the problems with literacy education in America based on his own experiences as a Puerto Rican growing up in New York. Though Villanueva does not often write specifically about immigration, his work illuminates the connection between rhetoric, racism and xenophobia, and encourages all of us in the field to consider how our conceptions of literacy oppress those not of the dominant culture.

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