In Search of Our Tiny Gardens: Adolescent Girl of Color Multiliteracies as Creative Praxis

ABSTRACT This piece uses Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens as a conceptual framework to highlight the unique ways Girls and Femmes of Color (GFOC) create beauty and life amidst a backdrop of devastating oppression. In doing so, we emphasize the brilliance and beauty of GFOC and their multiliterate practices while also challenging the notion of “art for art's sake.” This work will narrate our material and metaphorical relationship to their mothers' gardens, highlight literature and theory exemplifying GFOC multiliterate “gardening,” and provides vignettes from our research collaboratives with GFOC to highlight their creative and transformative praxis born of their raced‐gendered epistemologies.