How might middle school teachers and schools more appropriately engage early adolescent students in the writing process so that they are motivated and engaged to "want" to write and write well? This article introduces "Writers Matter," an approach designed to engage and motivate young adolescents in the writing process, connects this approach to the student engagement literature, and provides research results from a pre-post writing survey that focuses on student engagement. "Writers Matter" began as a pilot project in 2004 in one middle school located in a large urban school district. Research has been conducted yearly on (1) writing skill development; (2) student views on the impact "Writers Matter" had on their writing, personal growth, social awareness, and future goals; and (3) participating teachers' views on the program's influence on their students' writing, personal aspirations, and motivation to learn. These data have been helpful in improving the program each year. These data have provided significant evidence that "Writers Matter" engages students in the writing process both cognitively and emotionally. The focus of this article, therefore, is to explore the extent to which the "Writers Matter" approach achieves the aim of increasing engagement in writing using results from Writing Survey data using a nonequivalent pretest-posttest control-group design. "Writers Matter" supports literacy, equity, and excellence in middle grades through its focus on autonomy, voice, and relationship building in the context of writing tasks that connect to personal experience and other content areas.