Social justice writing happens in the intersection between what’s going on in the world and your vision of what a just outcome would be.

As someone who’s always written, and who cares deeply about the world we live in, I find myself looking for ways to combine my writing practice that explores what’s going on inside me with writing that takes stock of what’s happening in the world. I didn’t understand at first how to tie what went on inside of me with what went on outside of me. I think that’s true for so many of us. It somehow seemed simpler to look outside and write about what I see, or look inside and write about what I feel.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to do social justice writing. Say you’re thinking about health insurance and you think about the fact that there are people who don’t have health insurance because they don’t have a job, you might start exploring what would be possible. Does it have to be that way? Are there people who do it differently? What would it look like to make sure that everyone had the health insurance, coverage and ability to get the care they need – not just when they’re sick, but to keep them healthy? If you start writing about that, thinking about it on the page, then that’s what I would consider social justice writing.

Social justice writing is writing on the page that gets the mind to think about what’s possible in a different way.

Imagination. Writing has a role to play in cultivating your own imagination and the imagination of others. Why focus on writing that envisions the world that you want to see? A world that is more just, a world that honors and cultivates all of us, regardless of where we come from or how much we have. A world that takes stock of the wrongs that have been committed and thinks imaginatively about how to right those wrongs. It’s not simple though, never simple, there’s discomfort when we think about these things, the gap between what is and what we’d like to see.

What’s social justice writing? Writing that imagines a world in which all of us are treated fairly, with care and compassion, our potential encouraged – through the allocation of resources such as time, money, attention – to flourish.

Social justice writing imagines this world on the page. Provokes thought, meanders with curiosity. Tantalizes us with what’s possible.

Social justice writing encourages social justice thinking, social justice talking, social justice dreaming, social justice designing, social justice actions, and then a social justice world. Obviously social justice writing is not the only thing that’s needed, but it’s part of what is needed to envision and express the change we want to see.

Social justice writing fuels the imagination that makes possible the public policies, inventions, structures and actions that make change happen.

Social justice writing is the idea of writing about what moves the soul and connecting it to morality, to values, to decency, to the beloved community, to what can be, while identifying what is and what has been, not hiding from the history, not hiding from our part in it and talking about it. This is writing that looks at the periphery, reminding people what can be and how we can in fact design something different. We embrace our imagination while weaving in that which is. We embrace our imagination and what is by drawing, thinking, writing, talking, and then we begin again.

Here are a few writing books that I’ve found helpful as I think about writing about social justice issues in a way that engages both mind and heart.

Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing, by Louise Dunlap. And her website: https://louisedunlap.net/. There is much to love in her writing book, from ideas on generating new content, to tools for critical thinking, to ways of embracing your full self as you use writing to contribute to social justice. Inspiring.

They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. Yes, the authors are writing to help students understand how to engage in academic writing, but I find their explanations and templates very helpful for people who are wanting to engage in op-ed writing, and I’ve used the text when teaching op-eds. I love that the authors make explicit that writing is a conversation with others. There are a few different versions, some of which include writing by other authors. Here’s a link to the book: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393631678.

Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work – this is bell hooks writing about writing – why she does it, what it means to her, and key moments in her intellectual development. bell hooks is an author who is in deep connection with all matter of texts, including written texts, film texts, her own history, church texts. Hooks is an incredible thinker, rebel, feminist theorist and prolific author who has written over three dozen books and numerous essays.

Portable Writer’s Mentor by Priscilla Long provides great insight into how to nurture your writing practice and move the work into publication. I wish that I’d read this book sooner, because she talks about how to organize and track your work, structure that would have served me well 15 years ago when I was writing creative non-fiction and poetry seriously, and submitting work for publication. But guess what, now is what I’ve got!

When I was researching Priscilla, I saw that she’s written a series of short essays combining science and poetry – a testament to following your interests and artfully sharing what you’ve learned on the page: https://theamericanscholar.org/the-complete-science-frictions/