Much of my favorite work to read and to teach can be considered “resistant narratives”—work that responds to and rewrites the narratives we have received from a culture that often wishes to reduce and limit our very souls. To become an artist is to write oneself back into being. A book can be a place where the individual remakes the world. In this talk, we will consider writing as political resistance, a tool to counter the limitations of cultural, societal, and familial expectation. Contemporary writers have long created literary spaces of resistance and possibility, taking the status of outsider and expanding the project of literature.