To combat the inevitable intellectual fatigue that autobiographical essay assignments often engender and, more importantly, to provide students with an authentic audience and purpose for their writing, the author designed an autobiographical assignment that liberates students from the traditional essay format while empowering them to envision their futures (as well as the future of the world they hope to inhabit) and "shape their identities in effortful dialogic interrelationships" with their peers. Forward-looking autobiography (or what the author defines here as "proleptic autobiography") may also endorse students' intersectional identities by providing a discursive platform for the integration of their out-of-school lives with their academic pursuits. The anticipation of the future that characterizes much of adolescence contrasts sharply with the traditionally retrospective nature of much of the autobiographical writing that students are asked to do in school. Since proleptic writing will likely be unfamiliar to many students, young adult novels can serve as guides to the various forms that proleptic autobiographies might resemble. This form of autobiographical narrative can embody the agency they are developing; the act of composing their futures can manifest their emerging sense of self-determination and self-direction.