Journal of College Literacy and Learning • Vol. 44 • 2018 15 Transitioning Counter-Stories: Black Student Accounts of Transitioning to College-Level Writing Jamila M. Kareem University of Central Florida ABSTRACT Historically, in the field of writing studies, critical conversations around transitioning from secondary to post-secondary academic writing situations have centered on pedagogical and programmatic perspectives. For the most part, student experiences have been absent from these conversations, and voices of racially marked students have remained all but entirely absent. This article details some of the writing and high-school-to-college transitioning experiences of nine Black American students collected from interviews at a predominantly White university in the southern United States. These accounts show what gaps exist in current scholarship and disciplinary knowledge about student writers and transitioning as well as how college educators might create antiracist, culturally sustaining writing pedagogy at the transition level. “How can you have your mission statement say you strive for diversity and inclusion but most of the content that is taught say the opposite?” --Interviewee NF2 When students transition from high school to college writing, their success is measured on their ability to meet institutional, programmatic, and cross-curricular outcomes in writing competencies. As most students have had limited exposure to the specific ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing practiced in college- level writing (Bartholomae 1986), they are often, for a period, caught between their primary or previous academic discourses and the academic discourses they have yet to master. Even with this reality, student experiences of transitioning across the high school-college writing threshold are difficult to find. Research and theory on postsecondary writing practices focus on curricular infrastructure from the institutional side of the story, suggesting that before bringing in student voices, the institutions need to get their own houses in order. Where student voices are included (Carpenter & Falbo, 2006; Denecker, 2013; McDonald & Farrell, 2012), the accounts of students whose