History

WDA formed as Writers Against Trump in August 2020 to build a coalition in opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency and re-election campaign. The organization began as a small group of poets, fiction writers, and journalists—Paul Auster, Peter Balakian, James Carroll, Carolyn Forché, Todd Gitlin, Siri Hustvedt, and Askold Melnyczuk—who believed the administration to be uniquely dangerous to our present and future society. With Joe Biden’s election to the U.S. presidency in 2020, the name to Writers for Democratic Action. WDA is an organization of writers worldwide with a membership of more than 3,000. We urge all of you to join us. You can visit the “Join Us” page on our national website.

We are a volunteer organization devoted to working for democracy, especially in the U.S. where our democracy is under attack in the wake of political violence, an attempted coup d’état by a former President (now indicted and charged for national security violations and election interference, and currently the undisputed leader of the Republican Party), virulent conspiracy theory campaigns, and assaults on the rights of immigrants, women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, and others. 

We at WDA believe in literature as a bedrock of democratic culture, and literary language as a force of humanistic inquiry and cultural cohesion. Writers For Democratic Action has generated getting out the vote campaigns during Fall 2020 and 2022, and is now devoted to resisting the current administration in 2025. We are also focused on fighting the new wave of book banning as we witness it in places like Florida and Texas among other states; we work at connecting citizens to their bookstores and libraries; and we host educational webinars each month that focus on national and international issues as they pertain to democracy here and around the world. Some of our recent webinars have included conversations with Congressman Jamie Raskin, writers such as Margaret Atwood, Ada Limón, and Javier Zamora, and contemporary poets from Ukraine, and writers and scholars from Turkey.

We continue to use the platform that we and our members have built to advocate for justice and equality in the U.S. and across the globe.