What makes racial segregation in the United States especially harsh is that it robs most people of the means they need to bring it down. These include mutual knowledge, trust, and, most of all, a language of engagement that can keep people talking past the negativity, hurt, and hopelessness. In Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement, Linda Flower argues that such a language can be forged out of a set of powerful rhetorical strategies that disrupt the patterns of power and authority holding segregation and injustice in place. The book chronicles how these strategies have been tested, learned, taught, revised, and articulated over nearly two decades of work at the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh among neighborhood teens and elders, Carnegie Mellon students and faculty, teachers, police, politicians, church and community workers, and civic leaders. Along the way Flower provides a vision for a more full-throated field of rhetoric and writing studies that would be deeply informed by university-community collaborations