The introduction explains the historical moment in which Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich were teaching. It provides background information on the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program and CUNY’s open admissions policy. It also describes the book’s methodology, which combines a feminist approach to archival research with literary analysis. Situating their teaching within longer histories of social justice pedagogies (including traditions of Progressive, radical, Black liberatory, and Black feminist pedagogies, Freedom Schools, Black studies, and women’s studies), the introduction posits that these writers were theorists and practitioners of student-centered and feminist pedagogy. It also highlights two major patterns in their teaching: they redistributed classroom power to students and facilitated student knowledge production (especially through the publication of student writing). Finally, the introduction illustrates how teaching at CUNY shaped their writing and twentieth-century US literature more broadly. These classrooms gave rise to new literary forms, “the genres of open admissions”—the classroom lyric, the campus essay, and the anthology of student writing—and many insights associated with intersectional feminism.