Book excerpt: This text provides an in-depth exploration of rural community literacy, examining the ways in which community-building, social networks, time, race, and politics interplay. Mapping the dense literacy sponsorship network of a small rural town in the southeastern United States, Nichols offers a window into the challenges and successes of collective literacy sponsorship. Through an original mapping-focused approach, the book explores multiple social and environmental layers that construct literacy sponsorship writ large. This approach provides a novel methodological entry to rural literacies and will be key reading for rural community literacy advocates, literacy scholars, graduate students, and researchers.