Writing Towards Healing and Awareness

Join us in February 2025 for the Changemaker Authors Series: Writing Toward Healing and Awareness. Narrative Initiative and Unicorn Authors Club come together in person at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, as well as streaming online, for a panel and workshop event.

How does writing allow us to explore political grief, collective joy, and the range of emotions in between? How can we interrogate systems, relationships, and ways of engaging with the world around us? Authors Ibi Zoboi, Premilla Nadasen, and Zaina Arafat come together for a panel discussion reflecting on community building and systemic injustice through the lens of narrative nonfiction, afrofuturism, and other forms of storytelling.

Following the panel and a short break for book signings, attendees are welcome to attend a 40-minute Changemaker Authors writing workshop, both in-person and virtual, inspired by the speakers’ words. Writers and aspiring authors will learn how to focus social justice ideas and experiences into a single book project. Resources on the publishing process will be provided.

Program Schedule

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM: Panel Discussion

3:00 PM - 3:20 PM: Book Signings

3:20 PM - 4:00 PM: Writing Workshop

This event is part of the Changemaker Authors Series, a series of conversations taking place over the course of 2025 at the intersections of grief, resistance, and storytelling. A collaboration between Narrative Initiative and the Unicorn Authors Club, the series is a new iteration of the popular Changemaker Authors Conference. 

About the Speakers

ZAINA ARAFAT is an LGBTQ Arab-American fiction and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the novel, You Exist Too Much, which won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay's favorite book of 2020. Her essay collection, Our Arab, is forthcoming from Little, Brown. Zaina's stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper's Bazaar, BuzzFeed, VICE, Guernica, Literary Hub and NPR.

PREMILLA NADASEN is the author of Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which traces the roots and resistance embedded in the care economy since its origins in slavery; Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States, and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement, which examines how African American domestic workers strategically used storytelling to develop a political identity and reshaped the landscape of labor organizing. A recipient of the Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, she is the Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women and a Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University.

IBI ZOBOI was born in Haiti. When she was four, she immigrated to New York with her mother. Zoboi is the author of numerous titles including: (S)Kin (2025); American Street (2017), which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in Young Adult’s Literature, a Time Magazine Best YA Book Of All Time, and a Kirkus Best Book of the Year; Pride (2018), a contemporary remix of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; and My Life As An Ice Cream Sandwich (2020), a moving middle-grade debut of a girl finding her place in a world that’s changing at warp speed.

About the Facilitators

Jennifer Baker is an author/editor, writing instructor, and creator of the Minorities in Publishing podcast. She’s been a recipient of NYSCA/NYFA and Queens Council on the Arts grants, a 2024 Axinn Writing Award, and was named the Publishers Weekly Star Watch SuperStar in 2019. She edited the short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (2018) and is the author of Forgive Me Not (2023) a 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, an NYPL 2023 Best Book for Teens, and 2023 Best of the Best by the BCALA. Her website is: jennifernbaker.com.

MINAL HAJRATWALA (she/they) wrote the award-winning epic Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents, called “incomparable” by Alice Walker and “searingly honest” by the Washington Post; Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment (poetry); and the Moon Fiji travel guidebook. She created the Unicorn Authors Club to help authors finish books and her forthcoming book, The Chakra Playbook: For Writers, Artists and People with Spines, will publish with Union Square & Co.