Alone with Each Other

Eli Goldblatt is Professor Emeritus of English at Temple University and former director of New City Writing, an institute focused on community-related literacy projects in North Philadelphia. He earned his PhD in composition and rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His scholarly books include Literacy as Conversation: Learning Networks in Philadelphia and Arkansas (written with David Jolliffe); Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography; and Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum, which won the 2008 National Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Best Book Award. He has won best essay of the year awards from both College Composition and Communications and College English. The 2015 Conference on Community Writing presented him with the Outstanding Scholar Award. Goldblatt’s poems have appeared since 1973 in small literary journals such as Hambone, 6ix, Louisiana Review, and Another Chicago Magazine. His forthcoming poetry collection is From Away and earlier books include For Instance, Sessions 1-62, Speech Acts, and Without a Trace. His two books for children are Leo Loves Round and Lissa and the Moon’s Sheep.

Acknowledgments – Foreword Showing Up: Jessica Restaino – Introduction: Intertwinings – Setting the Scene: Conversation between Individual and Group – Authority in Its Social Context –Alone with Each Other: Conceptions of Discussion in One College Classroom Community. Written with Michael W. Smith. – Making Charoset: Teaching by Hand in the Shadow of MOOCs – "That Ceremonious Feeling of Growing Up": The Educational Practice of Bar Mitzvah in the Jewish Children’s Folkshul – Setting the Scene: All Literacy Is Nested in Communities – What Is Community Literacy? – Van Rides in the Dark: Literacy as Involvement in a College Literacy Practicum – Story to Action: A Conversation about Literacy and Organizing. Interview with Manuel Portillo and Mark Lyons, with Afterword – Garden in a Vacant Lot: Growing Thinkers at Tree House Books. Written with Darcy Luetzow and Lauren Macaluso – Afterword from Unsustainable – Gramsci in Chicago –Setting the Scene: Remembering, Imagining to Know – The Poetics of Remembering – This Is It –From Garret to Tree House from Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography – Imagining the Local: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and Community Literacy – Wang Wei and Charles Bazerman Compose a Mountain – Writing Practice, Not Practice Writing – Index.

“As an admirer of Eli Goldblatt’s original, groundbreaking, and beautifully crafted written work in composition, I think this focused book of his collected essays will be extremely compelling reading for people in this field”.
Russel Durst, Professor, University of Cincinnati

"Goldblatt’s perspective, his embeddedness in his place, community, and culture, and his range of topical interests is truly unique. He is a teacher, poet, essayist, activist, literacy scholar, and publisher of great importance. I don’t know anyone else whose work can simultaneously occupy so many vantage points so deeply and well."
Paula Mathieu, Associate Professor, Boston College