Writing with Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues with Kavita Das

january 14th–FEbruary 4, 2026
WEDNESDAYS, 7:00 PM–9:30 PM ET

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.

Some of the topics we’ll cover:

  • Motivations for writing about social issues

  • Avoiding sensationalism, stereotypes, and bias

  • Relationship between writer, reader, and subject

  • Understanding the balance between context versus narrative

  • Writing from observation and experience, writing from research, and writing from opinion

  • Different levels of research

  • Considering the implications of your work out in the world

Writers will leave with more grounding in how to write compellingly about complex social issues with nuance and sensitivity.

Class Outline:
Session 1: Understanding the Relationship between Writer, Reader, and Subject
Session 2: Exploring Approaches: Research (Researched and Reported Pieces) vs. Personal Experience (Personal Essay) vs. Opinion (Op Ed)
Session 3: Understanding Cultural Sensitivity and Avoiding Cultural Appropriation
Session 4: Implications of Writing About Social Issues

eligibility:

This workshop is open to all writers of color, and students must be able to attend all four sessions of the workshop. This workshop will be held over Zoom. We are pleased to offer pay-what-you-can options for this class. There are two scholarship spots available, and the applications are open through Friday, December 19th.

register for this workshop here

apply for a scholarship here

FACULTY:

Kavita Das came to writing twelve years ago after working for social change and social justice for fifteen years. She writes about culture, race, gender, and their intersections, writ large and small. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her work has been published in Salon, WIRED, CNN, Teen Vogue, Catapult, Fast Company, Tin House, Longreads, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Guernica, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Kavita is the author of two nonfiction books: Craft and Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues (Beacon Press, 2022), inspired by the Writing with Conscience class she created and teaches and Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar (Harper Collins India, 2019). She lives in New York but can be found in the virtual world on Twitter: @kavitamix and Instagram: @kavitadas and at kavitadas.com.