Maggie Polizos Peterson, Ph.D. is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Maryland Language Science Center at The University of Maryland, College Park. There, she instructs literacy courses for pre-service teachers in the Elementary Education, Secondary Education, and MCERT programs. She is the Director of the University of Maryland Writing Project. This project creates and delivers grant-supported professional development for teacher inquiry for writing instruction, creates classroom writing communities, and forms teacher leadership. She has facilitated The Memory Project, a writing workshop for Holocaust survivors at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum since its inception in 2001. A 2000 graduate of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, her current work focuses on the meaning-making processes of writing and writing as a tool for teacher agency and professional development. She approaches writing as a liberatory process that is integral to Critical Literacy. She also teaches Phenomenological Inquiry, a research methodology that foregrounds writing as a mode of researching lived human experience.