A major part of our team’s goal with Write Through the Night has always been to give a platform to diverse and underrepresented voices. As a small site that primarily works with early-career writers, we are oftentimes the first writing credit that a young author receives. That means we have the responsibility to encourage people from all backgrounds— especially those that don’t normally get a chance in mainstream media.
Our goal is to continue finding POC, Queer, and International writers who are looking for a platform to share their opinions. However, given that we are currently fully volunteer driven, we have struggled with how aggressively to push this narrative on social media and within this site.
Of course, on a media and pop culture website, there are two ways to support diverse voices. We can work with diverse writers, but we can also highlight the work of more well-established people who have broken into historically white male dominated fields.
For about a year now, we have kept the DIVERSE AUTHOR INDEX, a list of books we’ve reviewed on this site that have LGBTQ+ authors, authors of color, or authors who are a religious minority. While it is far from perfect, it is our attempt to highlight these authors in an additional place, as well as to give readers of these identities a place to find authors who they feel represented by.
In that vein, I am excited to announce both the DIVERSE DIRECTORS INDEX and the DIVERSE SHOWRUNNERS INDEX, for movies and TV shows respectively. I struggled for a while with how to distill a show or movie down into one category. There are so many people involved both behind the screen and in front of it, making it extraordinarily time consuming (and not all that useful) to chronicle everyone. Eventually, I settled on using directors for movies and showrunners for TV shows, since these are people who have a large influence, and receive large recognition, for their work behind the camera.
We have only been reviewing movies and TV shows for about a year on this site, and even our generalized indexes are a bit sparse. Still, we hope that these lists will grow rapidly as we continue reviewing and focusing on diverse media. If you have a favorite director, showrunner, or author that you want to see on this list, please submit a review pitch!
In the meantime, check out the work we’ve done on the indexes, and the reviews that are linked within, and let us know the ways you’d like to see them improve!
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