Dear Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy Community, “Finn Devouring Villainous” is the cover art of this issue. Cover artist and mom, Britt Hamre captured this shot of her son Finn after he stated, “This book is so good, I can't waste my time taking my helmet off.” Such is the effect of literacy that captures our attention, draws us in, causes us to become so engrossed as to lose ourselves in the moment, and ultimately moves us to action, leaving us changed as a result. Thoughtful responses from devouring literacy in solitude or collaboration are illustrated in this issue of JAAL. Jim Burke opens the issue with commentary, “Teaching by Design: Tools and Techniques to Improve Instruction.” He examines the evolution of design thinking in response to the demands of the Common Core State Standards for secondary literacy courses. In particular, he describes the careful process necessary for balancing design individually and within a professional learning community to improve collaboration and student learning. Marcelle Haddix, Josanique Everson, and Reba Y. Hodge's collaborative commentary “‘Y'all Always Told Me to Stand Up for What I Believe In”: 21st-Century Youth Writers, Activism, and Civic Engagement” shares the authors’ collective experience in the Writing Our Lives project, a community program with the mission of supporting the writing lives of urban youths. This commentary details the story of youth activist Everson's call to action following the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri. Everson, Haddix, and Hodge describe how they used social media to organize a student-led rally, including a speech written by Everson to address the need for social change that had not been addressed in school. The department columns also touch on the need to engage with literacies voraciously. Raúl Alberto Mora's Policy and Advocacy department presents “Addressing the Rural Context in Literacies Research: A Call to Action,” a column written by Amy Price Azano that discusses the dearth of rural contexts in literacy research and calls for literacy researchers and educators to promote greater social justice and address educational inequities for rural students. Then, Cathy Burnett and Guy Merchant discuss “The Challenge of 21st-Century Literacies” in Jen Scott Curwood's Pop Culture/Digital Literacies column. Burnett and Merchant discuss the dichotomy of several countries’ educational policy statements for the development of 21st-century literacy skills, and static definitions and draconian teaching practices that omit the evolution of new literacies and the fluidity of communicative practices whereby social interaction and technology coshape each other. To address this void in a reexamination of 21st-century literacies, the authors outline a set of nine principles to prompt discussion and reinvigorate professional development efforts and classroom practices. Joy Barnes-Johnson's Literacy Lenses piece, “Why I Write: Confessions of an Undercover Scientist,” describes the interdisciplinary connections among science, writing, and art and explores concrete teaching practices that link these disciplines. Jayne C. Lammers and Valerie L. Marsh examine adolescents’ fanfiction in “Going Public: An Adolescent's Networked Writing on Fanfiction.net” via a longitudinal inquiry with a 16-year-old fanfiction writer. This feature article explores how writers use this fanfiction site to network and to grow their writing through the shared online space, which provided supports unavailable to the focal adolescent writer at school. In their feature article, “Investigating Criteria That Seventh Graders Use to Evaluate the Quality of Online Information,” Julie Coiro, Carla Coscarelli, Cheryl Maykel, and Elena Forzani present qualitative findings from a study that examined the types of criteria that middle school students use to evaluate the quality of online information and sources while accomplishing a Web-based research assignment. In “What, Why, and How They Read: Reading Preferences and Patterns of Rural Young Adults,” Kim Becnel and Robin A. Moeller answer the call for literacy research in rural contexts presented in Amy Price Azano's Policy and Advocacy column in this same issue. Becnel and Moeller's feature article summarizes a research study that sought to understand the reading patterns and preferences of rural teen readers and the cultures of reading that existed in the rural communities in which they resided. Matthew Hall's feature article “Composing in Public: The Ambient Audiences of a Writing Lab” follows up on the ideas of balancing writing as an individual within a collaborative space, highlighting that writing is rarely completed in solitude. Hall demonstrates how adolescent authors created themselves as an ambient audience in a shared writing lab, whereby students wrote their own pieces but, through explicit and overheard discussions, revised and edited their work through a process of distributed co-construction. In “Valuing Stuff: Materials Culture and Artifactual Literacies in the Classroom,” Régine Randall and Mia Lynn Mercurio describe how teachers’ uses of theories of material culture and artifactual literacies may help students understand how that stuff becomes the literacies of a discipline. Randall and Mercurio give practical recommendations for choosing objects to help learners more deeply understand the discipline in which they are working/learning. In the final feature article of this issue, Shin-ying Huang explores the development of critical media literacy in a qualitative teacher inquiry entitled “Reconceptualizing Self and Other Through Critical Media Engagement: Experiences and Reflections of English Learners and Teacher.” In this study involving a group of freshmen in a general English course at a university in Taiwan, Huang reflects on the importance of helping students explore competing societal identities about masculinity balanced with their own subjective responses. The Text Review Forum columns provide several text suggestions. In the Visual and Digital Texts column, Stergios Botzakis evaluates apps and websites that promote learning about social studies, particularly geography, history, and government. Next, James Blasingame offers reviews of three texts in the Print-Based Texts column: Now That You're Here by Amy K. Nichols, We Can Work It Out by Elizabeth Eulberg, and Mobile Library by David Whitehouse. Finally, in Marcelle M. Haddix's Professional Resources column, Sherell A. McArthur reviews Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood by Ruth Nicole Brown. Devouring literacies, like Finn does in the cover art of this issue, requires much from all involved. We hope this issue provides ways and means for you to devour literacies in your research and teaching of literacies with the adolescents and adults in your life. Happy reading!