Can art change the world? Where do we draw the line between investigation and activism, intervention and witness, persuasion and propaganda? Who gets to claim personal and communal narratives, and what are the implications of breaking silence versus forgetting history?

This panel is held in conjunction with MFA Program in Writing faculty member Faith Adiele’s "Fire and Ink: Documentary Narrative," a multigenre, multimedia graduate course that considers the writer as an artist with a larger social (political, cultural, historical, spiritual) project.

Panelists

Editors of and contributors to the ground-breaking anthology Fire and Ink: Social Action Writing will read from their work, discuss social action writing as a genre, and answer your questions about engaged narrative and social practice.

Debra Busman

Coeditor of Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing, Debra Busman is a fiction and creative nonfiction writer and has been an activist all her life, beginning in utero at marches and protests with her labor union mother. She is currently co-director of the Creative Writing and Social Action Program at CSU Monterey Bay, and coordinator of the Division of Humanities and Communication's Service Learning Program.

Diana Garcia

Coeditor of Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing, Diana Garcia is the author of When Living Was a Labor Camp (University of Arizona Press, 2000), which was awarded an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation. She is an associate professor and codirector of the Creative Writing and Social Action Program at California State University Monterey Bay.

Aimee Suzara

Aimee Suzara is the author of the play Pagbabalik (Return), and she is working on her second play, A History of the Body. An advocate for the intersection of arts and literacy, she has taught and performed throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and now teaches in the Creative Writing and Social Action Program at California State University Monterey Bay.

Judith Tannenbaum

Judith lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works for San Francisco Writers Corps. She is a longtime advocate of the arts in prisons and spent many years teaching poetry at San Quentin. Her most recent work is By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives, with Spoon Jackson. Tannenbaum has published several books on teaching writing, including Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching at San Quentin.