New Book "We Are Meant to Rise" Amplifies Diverse Local Literary Voices

Racial Reckoning: The Arc of Justice

We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World features numerous local writers bearing witness to the tragedies and changes of the previous year.

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Tiffany Bui reports:

A new book offers a view of 2020 through the lens of 31 different writers of color. We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World features numerous local writers bearing witness to the tragedies and changes of the previous year.

Co-editors Carolyn Holbrook and David Mura showcase the diversity of stories that exist within Black, Indigenous and other communities of color in Minnesota. It’s a project of Holbrook’s organization, More Than A Single Story, which encourages cross-cultural understanding through public discussions for marginalized people.

According to Holbrook, they tried to select a diversity of authors, in race and ethnicity, as well as age.

“For me, and for More Than a Single Story, it is really important for people across the BIPOC communities to communicate with each other,” said Holbrook. “So that we can recognize that, as groups of people and as a collective group of people, we are stronger, more powerful.”

The book contains 34 stories, each different from the last. Some are on-the-ground reactions to the demonstrations following George Floyd’s murder. Others are personal essays on a variety of themes, like financial trauma and queer and trans survival. Mura writes in the book that these authors provide us with “individualized portraits of who we are.”

“The reader will get a sense of the enormous variety of experience and voices that are there in the Minnesota BIPOC community,” said Mura. “And it really shows that this is a very complex community, racially, ethnically, and we have a mix of different populations that are unlike anywhere in the country, including a very strong representation of Native American writers, which you wouldn't have in many other cities.”

Contributors include nationally-recognized local authors such as Kao Kalia Yang and Louise Erdrich, as well as emerging writers.