WDA of Kentucky

Kentucky Writers

for Democratic Action

WRITERS RESIST!

Mission

Writers For Democratic Action stands for democracy and freedom for all. With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, American democracy is endangered. The domestic threats are obvious. The peril, especially to those most vulnerable, is everywhere. Our military, created intentionally by our founders to be apolitical, is in danger of being used by Trump to fulfill his agenda and punish his enemies. The role of America in the world as a force for good is being challenged in the most autocratic of ways. Now more than ever, writers resist.

Kentucky writers have a long history of fighting back. In a state where constituents often do not feel represented by elected officials they have historically turned to their artists to be their voices. As Kentucky writers many of us feel a responsibility to speak up. Many of us have long been involved in the fights for environmental justice and civil rights. Interntaionally known Kentucky writers such as Wendell Berry, bell hooks, and Barbara Kingsolver have led the way in these fights but many more of us have been active and we need to organize. This group will give us a place to do that and will certainly be the place to look for future actions such as rallies and marches.

You can learn more about Writers for Democratic Action here.

History

We formed 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 Trump’s administration to be uniquely dangerous to our present and future society. With Joe Biden’s election to the U.S. presidency in 2020, we changed our name to Writers for Democratic Action. WDA is an organization of writers worldwide with a membership of more than 3,000. You can read our mission statement here. We urge all of you to join us. You can click here or visit the “Join Us” page on our 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 women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. 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 defeating Trump in 2024. 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 we and our members have built to advocate for justice and equality in the U.S. and across the globe.

Get Involved!

If you are a Kentucky writer, please contact silashouse1@gmail.com to learn more or to get involved. Use the subject line WDA of KY

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