Substance of Fire

Chicago Press, poetry and essays, 2018
Category
Poetry as Claire Millikin
About

Substance of Fire: Gender and Race in the College Classroom brings readers inside the four-year college experience, unfolding multiple perspectives and voices. This multi-genre book, written by college professor Claire Millikin, explores how race and gender function within the privilege of the four-year college classroom. Additional contributions are from recent graduates and current faculty, who interrogate the forces of sexism and racism from the various perspectives of gay, straight, biracial, white, African American, and Latino writers and artists. How does being a female professor differ from being a male professor? How does being a lesbian student make a difference in terms of accessing a professor’s time, attention, and respect? How does having dark skin or a non-Anglo last name impact a student’s freedom to pursue different majors? These and more questions are examined in The Substance of Fire. As the title suggests, race and gender are not topics “under control” in higher education but instead they are flash points, tinder, waiting just under the surface of our culture that still makes the claim of equal access to higher education even as so many lives testify to the incompleteness of this so-called equality. Gender and race can ignite, causing pain in the college setting. This book goes to the place of that fire.

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Midwest Book Review
“A multi-genre book, Substance of Fire deftly explores how race and gender function within the privilege of the four-year college classroom. Contributions are drawn from recent graduates and current faculty, who interrogate the forces of sexism and racism from the various perspectives of gay, straight, biracial, white, African American, and Latino writers and artists. . . . Gender and race can ignite, causing pain in the college setting. Substance of Fire goes to the heart and core of this enduring problem. Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, Substance of Fire will prove to be an extraordinary and valued addition to college and university library Educational Studies collections, as well as the personal reading lists of academia, administrators, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject.”