How do we properly define cultural appropriation and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first? In Appropriate , creative writing professor Paisley Rekdal addresses a young writer to delineate how the idea of cultural appropriation has evolved-and perhaps calcified-in our political climate. Rekdal examines the debate between appropriation and imagination, exploring the ethical stakes of writing from the position of a person unlike ourselves. What follows is a penetrating exploration of fluctuating literary power and authorial privilege, about whiteness and what we really mean by the term