Readings in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The following books address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in ways that are immediately relevant to the creative writing classroom. 
  • Adams, Maurianne, et al., Readings for Diversity and Social Justice.
  • Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.
  • Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
  • Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.
  • Ani, Marimba. Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior.
  • Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well.
  • Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States.
  • Brown, Michael K. et al. Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society.
  • Carruthers, Charlene A. Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.
  • Case, Kim A., ed. Deconstructing Privilege: Teaching and Learning as Allies in the Classroom. 
  • Case, Kim A. Intersectional Pedagogy: Complicating Identity and Social Justice. 
  • Chaves, Alicia Fedelina, and Susan Diana Longerbeam. Teaching Across Cultural Strengths: A Guide to Balancing Integrated and Individuated Cultural Frameworks in College Teaching. Stylus, 2016.
  • DeGruy-Leary, Joy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.
  • DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism.
  • DiAngelo, Robin. What Does It Mean to be White? Developing White Racial Literacy. 
  • Doane, Ashley W. and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, eds. White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism.
  • Feagin, Joe, Hernan Vera and Nikitah Imani. The Agony of Education: Black Students in White Colleges and Universities.
  • Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
  • Kailin, Julie. Antiracist Education: From Theory to Practice.
  • Kivel, Paul. Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Equity.
  • Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.
  • Lubiano, Wahneema. The House that Race Built.
  • Perea, Juan, ed. Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States.
  • Rifkin, Mark. ​Settler Common Sense.
  • Sensoy, Ozlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is Everyone Really Equal?
  • Steele, Claude. Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do.
  • Sue, Derald Wing. Microaggressions in Every Day Life.
  • Sue, Derald Wing. Race Talk: Conspiracy of Silence.
  • Takaki, Ron. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.
  • Tatum, Beverly Daniel. Why Are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
  • Taylor, Gary. Buying Whiteness: Race, Class and Identity from Columbus to Hip-Hop.
"[S]ocial justice is both a process and a goal. The goal of social justice is full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs. Social justice includes a vision of society in which the distribution of resources is equitable and all members are physically and psychologically safe and secure.

We envision a society in which individuals are both self-determining (able to develop their full capacities) and interdependent (capable of interacting democratically with others).

Social justice involves social actors who have a sense of their own agency as well as a sense of social responsibility toward and with others, their society, and the broader world in which we live. These conditions we wish not only for our own society but also for every society in our interdependent global community."
​
-Lee Anne Bell, "What Is Social Justice?"

Online Resources

Assessment / Self-Study Tools

From Creative Writers 

Alexander, Will. Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose Texts, Interviews, and a Lecture, 1997-2007. Edited by Taylor Brady. Essay Press, 2012.

Ali, Kazim. “Addressing Structural Racism in Creative Writing Programs.” Writer’s Chronicle. October 2016.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 3rd ed. Aunt Lute Book. San Francisco, 2007.

Ben-Oni, Rosebud, ed. On Poetics, Identity, and Latinidad: CantoMundo Poets Speak Out. Essay Press. 2017.

Black, Sheila and Bartlett. Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Cinco Puntos Press, 2011.

Borich, Barrie Jean. “The Craft of Writing Queer.” Brevity. 2012.

Cooley, Nicole. “Literary Legacies and Critical Transformations: Teaching Creative Writing in the Public Urban University.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 2003.

Crushway, Phil and Michael Warr, eds. Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin. Norton, 2016.

Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton UP, 2010. 

Das, Kavita. “On Parsing.” Vidaweb.org  6 February 2016.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Routledge, 1990.

Derricotte, Toi. “Baring/Bearing Anger: Race in the Creative Writing Classroom.” Writers Chronicle. October/November 1995.

Hegamin, Tonya. “Inclusion and Diversity: A Manifesto and Interview.” Journal of Creative Writing Studies 1.1. 2016.

Hill, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle and McCall, Sophie. The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation. ARP, 2015.

Hong, Cathy Park. “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde.” Lana Turner 7. November 2014.

Gordimer, Nadine. Writing and Being. Harvard UP, 1995. 

Jones, Omi Osun Joni L., Lisa L. Moore, Sharon Bridgeforth, eds. Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project. University of Texas Press, 2010.

Khakpour, Porochista. “The Others.” Guernica. 2011.

Lee, Sherry Quan, ed. How Dare We! Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse. Modern History Press, 2007.

Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Lore, Practice, and Social Identity in Creative Writing Pedagogy: Speaking with a Yellow Voice?” Pedagogy 10.1. (Winter 2010).

McCullough, Laura, ed. A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race. U of Georgia P, 2015.

Moody, Rick, Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Patrick Roth, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Minae Mizumura, Katja Lange-Muller, and Yoko Tawada. “Inappropriate Appropriation: A Believer Nighttime Event. PEN America World Voices Festival, 2005.” Web.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage, 1992.

Muller, Lauren, and June Jordan. June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. Taylor & Francis, 1995. 

Mura, David. “Ferguson, Whiteness as Default, and the Teaching of Creative Writing.” Writers Chronicle (October/November 2016). 

Mura, David. “White Writing Teachers (or David Foster Wallace vs. James Baldwin).” Journal of Creative Writing Studies 1.1. (2016).

Oliver, Stephanie Stokes. Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing. Ink 37 (2018).

Perry, Adrienne. “Writing Without Shelter.” Journal of Creative Writing Studies 1.1. 2016.

Philip, M. NourbeSe. Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture. Mercury P, 1992.

Rankine, Claudia, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap, eds. The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. Fence, 2015.

Rankine, Claudia. “In Our Way: Racism in Creative Writing.” Writer’s Chronicle. October/November 2016.Web.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective.” Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: I & Eye, Ed. Bich Minh Nguyen and Porter Shreve. Pearson, 2004.

Teleky, Richard. “‘Entering the Silence: Voice, Ethnicity, and the Pedagogy of Creative Writing.” MELUS 26.1. Spring 2001.

Wang, Dorothy. Thinking its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Asian American Poetry. Stanford University Press, 2014.

Verduyn, Christl, ed. Literary Pluralities. Broadview Press, 1998.

​Xi, Xu. “Three Commandments for Writing about Race.” Brevity 53. Fall 2016.
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