We’ve gathered the following resources to help our members and others foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in the literary and arts community. We will continue to update this list as we learn of new opportunities. To suggest any additions, please send an email to [email protected].
Resources for Arts Leaders, Publishers & Editors
A Letter From a Black Woman in Publishing
In this open letter, published online by Poets & Writers, Mariah Stovall addresses racism in the publishing community and calls on publishing leaders to hire more Black people in editorial and acquisitional roles.
Antiracist Toolkit for Organizations – Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Publishing
This toolkit was developed by a scholarly publishing organization, but is widely applicable to organizations looking to transform their organizational practices towards antiracism and DEI.
Beyond the Board Statement
The Nonprofit Quarterly offers a two-part video series discussing “how boards of directors can and should join the movement for racial justice.” The videos, which feature nationally recognized governance, strategy, and equity consultants Vernetta Walker and Robin Stacia, address the following questions: “What is the nonprofit board of directors’ responsibility and opportunity for leadership around racial justice? Beyond the board statement, what can boards do to ensure that the organizations they govern are living their values?”
Bloomerang DEI Policy Guide
This guide for creating an organizational DEI policy is geared towards arts nonprofits.
Conscious Language Style Guide
Style guides for writing about various communities, including terminology and evolving thought on best practices.
Disability Language Style Guide
Style guide for writing about disability and related concepts from the National Center on Disability and Journalism.
Diversity Style Guide
Style guide and glossary for various cultural terms and concepts. The creator, Rachele Kanigel, also offers consulting and speaking services on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
How to Reduce Implicit Bias with Anonymous Review
In this blog post, Submittable suggests ways editors can use anonymous review to reduce implicit bias in the submission process, allowing them “to focus their attention on the application, manuscript, or proposal in front of them—rather than the person who submitted it.”
Integrating Inclusivity Into Your Submission & Application Process
This guide from Submittable features seven key strategies for making sure your submission and application processes are inclusive.
Race Equity and Inclusion Action Guide
This guide from the Annie E. Casey Foundation covers seven steps “to advance and embed race equity and inclusion within your organization” and helps leaders set goals and assess the impact of policies and other actions on racial equity.
Towards a More Conscious Leader
This guide by Ama Codjoe, published in the National Guild for Community Arts Education’s Guild Notes, provides arts leaders with a framework for assessing their own privilege and adopting ways of “seeing, listening, and being that can deeply transform not only your leadership practice but your life.”
Trans Journalists Association Style Guide
Style guide for writing about trans people and trans-related topics.
Resources for People of Color in the Arts & Literary Community
Latinx in Publishing
Networking, mentoring, and resource group for Latinx individuals in publishing.
People of Color in Publishing
Networking, mentoring, and resource group for POC in book publishing. The group offers a six-month mentorship program providing entry-level publishing professionals with “a personal resource for support, guidance, and encouragement.”
Representation Matters Mentorship Program
Mentorship program for individuals who identify as BIPOC and who are seeking to enter professions in book publishing and the literary field. The program seeks both mentees and mentors.
Virtual Affinity Spaces
Arts Administrators of Color, an arts service network that focuses on networking and community building through the arts, offers “virtual affinity spaces” for Asian, LGBTQ, and Middle Eastern arts leaders and for arts leaders with disabilities. (The organization also offers a mentorship program for entry-level arts administrators of color.)
Talent Databases
Editors of Color Database
Database listing editorial professionals of color. Individuals can submit profiles, search the database, and peruse/submit job listings.
Black Editors and Proofreaders
Database of freelance editors and proofreaders who identify as Black.
Black Editors – A Network for Black Editors
Networking group for professional and freelance editors descended from the African diaspora.
Black Writers Only
This database of Black writers includes names and contact info for writers in many areas of expertise. Writers can add themselves via a separate form.
Disabled Writers Database
Database of disabled writers. Journalism-focused, but many of the listed writers are also interested in literary writing.
Writers of Color
This database of writers of color is organized by speciality and area of expertise. The writers listed are not exclusively literary.
Resources for Educators & Librarians
Access and Inclusion: A Guide for Grub Street Instructors
Grub Street‘s guide for teachers, professors, writers, and the general public “provides information, strategies, and approaches to help all of us interrogate our own internal biases and treat everyone with respect and understanding.”
Advancing Race and Equity in Public Libraries
This paper from the Government Alliance on Race & Equity highlights strategies public libraries are using to advance equity.
Becoming an Antiracist Educator
This action-oriented guide, produced by Wheaton College, offers antiracist resources for educators. The first half of these resources aid in personal reflection, with information about racism, whiteness, allyship, racial trauma, critical race theory, intersectionality, and impact. The second half of these resources are meant to help educators take action, from working to process their own biases to preparing for difficult classroom discussions, providing better feedback to students, and incorporating an antiracist pedagogy.
Inclusive Teaching Guide
This guide from the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning offers strategies for teachers to “reflect on beliefs about teaching, and maximize self-awareness and commitment to inclusion,” including addressing personal biases and ensuring that interactions with students are inclusive and fair.
Institutionalized Racism: A Syllabus
This syllabus from JSTOR Daily offers articles about institutional racism alongside underlying scholarship, addressing American history, police brutality, and economic and educational disparities.
Libraries Respond: #BlackLivesMatter
This guide from the American Library Association offers a series of resources and steps libraries can take to ensure they are inclusive and antiracist.
Teaching Tolerance
A project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Teaching Tolerance provides free resources on anti-bias and social justice to educators working with children from kindergarten through high school.
We Need Diverse Books in the Classroom
We Need Diverse Books, an organization advocating for literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people, provides free diverse books and author visits to schools around the country in an effort to address the literacy gap that affects marginalized youth.
Training Programs, Consultants & Workshops
Affinity Group Series
This meeting series hosted by the NYC Arts in Education Roundtable supports “actively dismantling the systems of racial oppression in our field and beyond.”
artEquity
artEquity provides “training and consulting services to individuals and organizations on creating and sustaining a culture of equity and inclusion through the arts and culture.” Their core program is an annual intensive facilitator training, designed for “arts leaders, arts practitioners, arts educators, arts advocates, board members, funders, supporters, and others” interested in facilitating around “issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Arts Connect International
Consulting, events, and research on cultural equity in the arts.
Dismantling Racism Works
Originally designed to support a two-day antiracism workshop, this guide from Dismantling Racism Works is now available online as a free workbook addressing assumptions, history, internalizations, white supremacy culture, and more.
EDI Speakers Bureau
The American Library Association has compiled a database of library experts on diversity, equity and inclusion.
Equity Training Consultants
Americans for the Arts has assembled a list of consultants and organizations working at the intersection of the arts and diversity/equity/inclusion, either through consultation or trainings.
Project Implicit
The Implicit Association Test allows users to measure their implicit associations about social attitudes (including “race, gender, and sexual orientation”) and about health (including “exercise, anxiety, alcohol, eating, and marijuana”). Affiliated with Harvard University, Project Implicit is a non-profit organization and international collaborative network of researchers investigating implicit social cognition. They also provide consulting services, lectures, and workshops for many different types of organizations; these services focus on “diversity and inclusion, leadership, biases in decision-making, and/or barriers to innovation.”
Race Forward
Race Forward offers a virtual Building Racial Equity training to help us “begin to equip ourselves with some of the tools, resources and analysis we need in order to actively choose racial justice, every time.”
Racial Equity in Arts Funding Workshops
Grantmakers in the Arts offers workshops “designed to help participants recognize that cultural funding is a system that has been historically racialized like so many societal systems and to help guide our approaches to re-designing cultural funding as an anti-racist system.”
The Racial Equity Institute
The Racial Equity Institute (REI) offers services and workshops helping “leaders and organizations who want to proactively understand and address racism, both in their organization and in the community where the organization is working.” Their in-person or virtual programs can be tailored to different time slots and durations, including the three-hour Groundwater Presentation introducing participants to racial equity; the two-day Phase 1 training “designed to develop the capacity of participants to better understand racism in its institutional and structural forms”; and a custom two-year program that includes an assessment of an organization’s steps to becoming antiracist, plan for chance, and coaching in the principles and practices of antiracism.
Racial Equity Toolkit: An Opportunity to Operationalize Equity
This toolkit from the Government Alliance on Race & Equity is designed to help “develop strategies and actions that reduce racial inequities and improve success for all groups.”
Talking About Race
The National Museum of African American History & Culture provides tools and guidance for talking and learning about race and racism, including issues of bias, whiteness, and the historical foundations of race.
Resources on Accessibility in Print and Digital Publishing
The Ultimate Guide to Creating Accessible Submission Forms
This guide from Submittable offers step-by-step directions to making your submission forms accessible to users with cognitive challenges, who need to use speech controls and speech-to-text software, who have limited motor control, who use screen readers, and who navigate solely using keyboard controls.
Accessible Publishing
The Accessible Books Consortium has compiled a guide on how publishers can create publications that are fully accessible to all readers. In particular, they recommend using the accessibility features of the EPUB3 standard for digital publications and including descriptions of the accessibility features of their products in the information they provide to retailers and others in the book supply chain.
Publishing Accessible Content
The National Center on Disability and Journalism offers this guide on publishing accessible content online, including text, video, and graphic design.
Book Lists & Further Reading
An Antiracist Reading List
Ibram X. Kendi offers a list of books “to help America transcend its racist heritage.”
An Antiracist Poetry Reading List
Curated by Maya Popa, these poetry collections “offer poignant narratives and snapshots of racial injustice in America.”
Black Liberation Reading List
This reading list, curated by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, features books about antiracism and by Black writers.
Literature for Justice
The National Book Foundation’s Literature for Justice Committee annually selects books that “explore the criminal justice system and aim to help advance public understanding of mass incarceration in the United States.”
Peggy McIntosh’s White Privilege Papers
The National SEED Project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) presents Peggy McIntosh’s pivotal writings about her own white privilege, including “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”
Social Justice: A Reading List
In response to the protests in our country calling for racial justice and equity, we asked our member presses to recommend books that speak to social justice, activism, police brutality, and human rights.
