Introduction

Hello. Hello. I hope you’re all doing well today. We have another special episode of Academic Book Writing Simplified, where I interview an alum of the Elevate program, which is now known as Book Brilliance. Dr. Brittany Fox-Williams is an assistant professor of sociology at Lehman College, which is part of the City University of New York. She is also a member of the sociology doctoral faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center.

She joined Elevate about two years ago to work on her forthcoming book, which looks at racial inequality among youth in American education. She focuses on the New York City public school system and interactions between students and authority figures, but I’ll let her tell you more about that in the interview.

During our conversation, we talk about her time in the program, what she learned, and how she continues to use what she learned in the program even now. And I want you to listen until the end because she shares some really excellent tips about how to seek funding for professional development. Dr. Brittany Fox-Williams is a grant expert. She is very good at securing grant money, and she gives you some tips at the end for how to think about funding.

I really hope you enjoy this conversation, and I will let you get right to listening.

Meet Dr. Brittany Fox-Williams

Welcome to Academic Book Writing Simplified. I’m your host, Jane Joann Jones, a writing coach and developmental editor who’s here to give you some tough love about the way you write. This podcast is for women and non-binary scholars in academia who are writing academic books but feel as if the process is a little or a lot like a mystery. If you’re ready to trade your confusion and frustration for ease, clarity, and purpose, you’re in the right place.

Let’s head into today’s episode. Dr. Brittany Fox-Williams, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Jane. I’m so excited to be here.

I am excited to have you because I can’t wait to talk to you about your time in Elevate—now known as Book Brilliance—for anyone listening. So there’s no confusion. But we are going to talk today about your time in the program, also what your research is about, what your book is about, and, you know, how you experienced your time and what you’re doing now. You are an alum of the program. So first, just tell us a little bit about your book.

About the Book Project

Yeah. Thank you so much. So my book looks at race and trust in urban schools. I use New York City as a case study, and it’s definitely a mixed-methods book. So I use some survey and administrative data from New York City public schools, and I find that Black students report the lowest levels of trust in their educators. And then for me, it wasn’t necessarily surprising to find that result as someone who studies racial inequality in education, but I thought it was really important to understand Black students’ perspectives on trust, what trust means to them, why it matters to their educational outcomes, and what they think are strategies for improving their trust.

So I went into New York City schools. I interviewed high school students across four schools in the city. And through Elevate, I was really able to turn that project into something legible, into a book, and to come up with an argument that I’m hoping that readers will appreciate.

Deciding to Join Elevate

Well, tell us a little bit about what made you decide to join Elevate originally.

Sure. I joined about a year and a half ago, I think. So I was in the June 2023 cohort, so almost two years ago.

That time went by really quickly. And, actually, Jane, I learned about you and your work through a mutual friend who had worked with you in the past, and I had been stalking your website for a really long time and just trying to figure out ways to work with you. And then I saw that Elevate was actually a program or opportunity that I could potentially kind of use to work with you.

At that stage, I wasn’t quite ready to work on my book, but it was just something that I kept in the back of my mind. But when I felt like it was time for me to, like, really buckle down and work on the book, I applied for some grant money to participate in Elevate.

And I think at that time when I enrolled in Elevate, I had just drafted a book proposal using some examples from friends, but really hadn’t exactly figured out what my argument was and still didn’t entirely understand the road map of writing a book. It requires such a mind-shift kind of approach to writing. It’s a very different style of writing, something that you’re not necessarily taught in graduate school. It requires a lot of project management. And for me, as someone who appreciates project management, I really liked the structure of Elevate. So that’s what encouraged me to participate.

Yes. You are excellent at project management. You are like A++.

It really is what keeps me going. I’m very task-oriented, and I just felt like there was a lot of alignment between me and the Elevate program in that way.

Shifting from Dissertation to Book Writing

We’re very into task management and project management in the program. I know you did a lot of the tracking exercises, like the time audits and all of that, and you were right in there. Like, “I did my audit.”

Absolutely.

So when you talk about the mindset shift you have to make when going from writing a dissertation—and also articles—into writing a book, can you tell me a little bit about that?

For me, the first thing was seeing myself as an expert. I think in graduate school, like, you learn how to write a dissertation, you learn how to review the literature, and kind of, like, regurgitate a bit, share some of your own findings. But, like, in some ways, it doesn’t entirely feel like you have ownership over the project.

With the book, it’s a very different type of approach. Like, you are very much in charge of your project. You have to keep the project moving forward. There’s no one looking over your shoulder to make sure that you get it written. You’re working on a very short time frame when you’re on the tenure track. And at the same time, you want to put something out there in the world that people are gonna appreciate and want to read. You want the book to be viewed favorably by the folks that you want to read your book.

And you also don’t want to write a book that has a whole lot of jargon in it. All of that wrapped up requires book writers to think in a new way about being a writer and being a scholar, and writing for a more general audience. That’s not necessarily something that I learned in graduate school. I know a lot of people don’t learn that, and I felt like through Elevate, I was able to start to make that shift.

What Helped Facilitate That Shift

What do you think happened in Elevate—whether in the curriculum, coaching, or feedback—that helped you make that shift?

I think the coaching was actually a really helpful piece in that. I mean, the coaching wasn’t necessarily therapy, but in some ways I saw it as academic therapy because it kind of forced you to recognize that you’re an expert. It also forced you to understand that as a woman scholar or a non-binary scholar, especially someone who takes care of people—I have a child—that, you know, it’s not all you. You’re not the one who is responsible for how academia is set up. But you still have to learn how to operate successfully in the system.

So I thought the coaching was really helpful in me being able to see that and understand how I could kind of hack the system and work through it.

I like that. “Hack the system.” I’m going to write that down.

Jane, I’m making this stuff up as I go.

Curriculum Experience and Takeaways

Tell me about your experience with the curriculum. You’ve already mentioned the project management pieces. How about the other elements—book overview instruction, Elevate assets, and the writing-focused lessons?

Definitely. So I love a good worksheet. And I think the Elevate worksheets for trying to work through your argument, work through your framework, were immensely helpful. It gave me a place to start and think about the types of questions I need to be answering about the argument and the framework—how I need to be positioning my book, how I need to be thinking about my contribution and my audience.

There are so many books out there about book writing and you can continue to read and read and read, right? But what I liked so much about Elevate is it just really cuts through a lot of the noise and tells you exactly what you need to do and what you need to be thinking about to write a good book.

I especially valued the extended framework. I hadn’t really thought about a framework for a book before. I’d thought about an argument, but the framework was a really great kind of approach to writing a book. You think about: how is my book going to be situated in a broader literature? How is it in conversation with other scholars? How do I want it to be received by the public once it comes out?