Gordon Mantler is an Associate Professor of Writing and of History and Executive Director of the University Writing Program at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He specializes in the history and rhetoric of 20th century social justice movements and the African American and Latino experience in the United States, as well as oral history and the history of film. His first book, Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960-1974, was published in 2013 as the inaugural volume in the Justice, Power, and Politics series at the University of North Carolina Press. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a summer fellowship from the Black Metropolis Research Consortium and the first annual Ronald T. and Gayla D. Farrar Media and Civil Rights History Award for the best article on the subject. His current book project focuses on Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, and the development of the multiracial coalitions that made Harold Washington the city's first black mayor in 1983. Mantler also conducts and writes about pedagogical research on the impact and efficacy of using student publications in the first-year writing classroom. Yet another project, in its infancy, explores public history in the nation’s capital, and how museums, memorials, monuments, and films in Washington, D.C., narrate the history of race in the United States.