Cynthia D. Urbanski is a former middle school and high school teacher. She is currently an ethnographer for the Renaissance West Community Initiative and a teacher consultant for the UNC Charlotte Writing Project where her best days are those when teachers let her teach their classes. She is the author of The Workshop Approach to High School English and coauthor of Thinking Out Loud on Paper. She has a PhD in Urban Literacy K–12 and is currently working on projects centered on the rhetoric of help and genre theory.