ABSTRACT
Claude Hurlbert is best known as a gifted teacher: he has won numerous teaching awards and is ranked among the 300 best professors in the U.S. by Princeton Review (https://RateMyProfessors.com">RateMyProfessors.com lists him as number 8). A distinguishing assignment Hurlbert uses in composition classes is described in his book Letters for the Living: Teaching Writing in a Violent Age (1998). He asks students in his undergraduate composition classes to write an entire book in a single semester about something they are burning to tell the world. In these books, students often recount scenes of violence and social injustice that they themselves are still working to grapple with.
