The time investment that literacy curriculum design requires, if it is to be truly meaningful to students, is considerable. Crafting an organizing curricular model, identifying appropriate and relevant texts, and purposefully scaffolding instruction can take more time than teaching the class itself. And, given the current legislative policy reform movements within higher education and more directly within developmental education (where most postsecondary literacy instruction is housed), this work becomes even more intense. With these realizations in mind, we set out to begin work on curriculum design for IRW (and other literacy contexts) that takes its energy from a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies approach and an intertextuality-based approach. This manuscript provides the seeds of that model.