Generating more questions than it answers, Community Listening invites readers to learn about listening that is deeply enmeshed in specific community sites, stories, and relations. Contributors bring their lived experience as listeners in, to, and alongside the communities whose praxes they surface in chapters that enrich and complicate the deep interrelationship of listening and storytelling. Affirming that storytelling is the vessel through which community listening is made, unmade, and remade, the stories in this collection probe what it means to listen from community vantages and to bring such listening into academic conversations. Collectively, the contributors to this multidisciplinary collection advance scholarship that has community as the locus of iterative knowledge seeking and sharing.

Jenn Fishman pursues teaching, research, and leadership opportunities across three areas of academic work: undergraduate research, longitudinal research, and community literacies. A recipient of the Braddock Award and PI of several grant-supported projects, her publications include The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (with Dominic DelliCarpini and Jane Greer, Parlor Press), Telling Stories: Perspectives on Longitudinal Research in Writing Studies (with Amy Kimme Hea, Utah State University Press) and special issues of CCC Online, Community Literacy Journal (with Lauren Rosenberg), and Peitho (with Jessica Enoch). Co-founder and Chief Capacitator of the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), she is Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the Ott Memorial Writing Center at Marquette University.

Romeo García is assistant professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. His interdisciplinary research appears in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture. García is co-editor (with Damián Baca) of Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise (winner of the 2020 Conference on College Composition & Communication Outstanding Book Award, Edited Collection), Unsettling Archival Research (with Gesa Kirsch, Caitlin Burns Allen, and Walker P. Smith, Southern Illinois University Press) and Pluriversal Literacies (with Ellen Cushman and Damián Baca, University of Pittsburgh Press).

Lauren Rosenberg is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the English department at the University of Texas at El Paso where she directs the first-year composition program, a recipient of the Conference on College Composition and Communication 2022-2023 Writing Program Certificate of Excellence. Much of her writing and research is in the subfield of community literacy. She is the author of The Desire for Literacy: Writing in the Lives of Adult Learners and numerous articles and book chapters that focus on the literate lives of adult learners. These include a co-authored essay with Stephanie L. Kerschbaum “Entanglements of Literacy Studies and Disability Studies,” which won the 2021 Richard C. Ohmann Outstand Article in College English Award. Together with Jenn Fishman, she guest edited a 2018 special issue of Community Literacy Journal where the idea of community listening was launched.