The current fraught socio-political climate is motivating nonfiction writers to engage with social issues on the page. There’s a collective realization that the personal is political, and the political is personal. In truth, the writer has long played a role as a witness, conscience, and predictor of social change.

In this workshop, we will consider the following questions: How do we write compellingly yet responsibly about social issues? How do we write about the world as we’d like it to be without coming across as Pollyanna or propaganda?

In each class session, we will investigate these questions through lessons and reflections from my own experience as a writer who has written about and worked for social change.

We’ll also explore these questions through close readings and discussions of an array of work by writers who consistently engage social issues, including George Orwell, Gaiutra Bahadur, Jesmyn Ward, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kiese Laymon, and Arundhati Roy. These works will range from personal essays to opinion editorials to reportage and some hybrid works that combine different approaches and genres. We’ll analyze and discuss how these writers found the story in the issue and the issue in the story.

Finally, we’ll consider and apply key writing craft concepts and techniques to our own writing by engaging in generative creative writing exercises and assignments.

This is a four-week long workshop starting on Wednesday, January 14th from 7:00 PM–9:30 PM ET. This workshop is open to all writers of color.

Check out the class page for more information. To see all of our upcoming classes, visit kundiman.org/online-classes.