In 2024, Poets Against Racism & Hate USA and the Ohio Poetry Association (OPA) presented the Ohio Underground Railroad Whistle-Stop Poetry Tour to raise awareness of issues of social injustice, hate, and prejudice past and present. Tour events took place at Underground Railroad sites around Ohio and included poetry readings and workshops, history talks, musical and interpretive performances, and other programming. Central to the tour was a traveling collaborative writing project. At each tour stop, attendees responded in writing to the question “What does freedom mean to you?” The poem “How We See Free” emerged from the more than 100 responses to this question and was published on PARH USA’s Featured Poem page.
Now this project has received recognition through publication in Community Literacy Journal (CLJ), an academic journal that publishes work not only by scholars but also by creative writers and community literacy practitioners. “How We See Free” appears in the third edition of Coda: Community Writing + Creative Work, a section included in select issues of CLJ. Coda is “dedicated to supporting writers who are involved in projects relating to community engagement and activism, to preserving the work that ensues from community writing projects, and to expanding the kinds of writing published in academic journals.” In alignment with our reasons for incorporating a collaborative writing project into the Ohio Underground Railroad Whistle-Stop Poetry Tour, the Coda editors believe “that the creative impulse resides in everyone, and that this impulse can be a force for personal, community, and societal transformation.”
Beyond “How We See Free,” the content of this edition of Coda is pertinent to PARH USA members and subscribers in another way. Specifically, the Coda editors have superseded their typically traditional introduction of the section’s content with an “alphabet of resistance” that identifies terms the federal government has removed from its websites. Just some examples are activism, allyship, Black, disability, disparity, gender-affirming care, immigrants, indigenous community, oppression, privilege, and social justice. Interspersed among these terms are the titles and descriptions of the works comprising the special section. The editors explain that they view the removal of the identified terms as “acts of harm that require us to resist,” and they encourage us all to use them … to amplify them.
CLJ is an open-access journal. You can read the Coda article “How We See Free”—which includes our PARH USA/OPA reflection statement about the poem and the poem itself—here. And you can read “Editors’ Introduction: An Alphabet of Resistance” here. We hope you’ll find these materials to be enrichingly relevant to your interest in using the power of poetry to fight racism, bigotry, and hate.
