✊🏾 Disrupting Narratives of Power
On Friday May 1st, I attended one of two major May Day gatherings being held in Los Angeles. Thousands of people came together to disrupt business-as-usual. As I traversed the streets of Downtown LA armed with my camera and microphone, I asked many of the people I encountered this question: why weren't more people out in the streets and what would it take to organize a mass general strike?
Later this week I'll bring you a May Day report with some of their answers. If you're a paid subscriber to Rising Up With Sonali, you'll get the full video and transcript of the report in your inbox. (Free subscribers always have access to the audio version).
Scenes from Downtown LA. Photos by Sonali Kolhatkar.
Hours later, I dragged my tired feet to Lit Fest in the Dena, an annual free 2-day literary festival in Pasadena/Altadena where writers and those who love the written word come together to explore their favorite trends in publishing and creative work.
My 2023 book, Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice and my 2025 book, Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible were both featured at LitFest.
(And by the way.... drumroll please.... in the coming weeks you'll be the first to know about my super-secret project this year, a NEW BOOK scheduled for publication in August 2026!)
At LitFest also led a workshop about how to identify racist tropes in literature and what writers can do to counter them. In our white supremacist society, people of color have always fought to tell our own stories, to be the heroes of our own tales, to not be props in white centered stories. Storytelling, or, the modern word for it –narrative—is so important because it shapes culture and culture shapes policy and the distribution of power. So, how we tell stories matter, and who those stories impact, matters. This also means that as storytellers we have a superpower to change society and the responsibility to use that power wisely.
At LitFest I began making myself comfortable around other fiction writers. WHY? Because I've been fascinated by pop culture, fiction, media, and narrative for years. And because I have attempted to put my money where my mouth is, to create fiction that isn't designed for the white gaze. My first novel, Queen of Aarohi, will be published by Red Hen Press in Fall 2027.
As a journalist who's spent 24 years in the reporting trenches, I've been uncomfortable and embarrassed about giving voice to my transition to literature and fiction. 😳 But I'm slowly getting over it.
At a LitFest panel about publishing marginalized authors, one panelist said something that struck me: since we are storytellers, we need to be comfortable telling the story of how our stories came about. So, that's what I'm going to try to do more of. After all, now that I'm used to producing a one-woman show (hosting, booking, recording, editing, mixing, uploading all on my own), I might as well get used to doing the same for my writing career (writing, marketing, speaking).
Also at LitFest I had the absolute joy of attending one of the final panels on Saturday about the ripple effect of education in prison and unexpectedly discovered that all four panelists knew my dear friend and Rising Up correspondent Dortell Williams.
Dr. Taffany Lim, who runs a Bachelor's degree program in California prisons, moderated the panel. Her fellow panelists, Mario Guerra, Risala Rose-Aminifu and Jimmer Gilmer, had all served decades in prison and found a powerful sense of freedom via higher education. We lamented the fact that Dortell remains incarcerated in spite of having similar circumstances to the formerly incarcerated panelists and many others who have been trapped in California prisons. So here's my reminder to you, dear subscriber: If you haven't already done so, please sign Dortell's Change.org petition and write to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, urging him to commute Dortell's sentence.
Dortell and I recently addressed students at Santa Rosa Junior College leading a discussion about the abolition of policing and prisons. Because he remains trapped behind bars, Dortell joined us via video chat.
Finally, if you're in the Pasadena area, and are a young person or are raising a young person, do RSVP to this upcoming event on Saturday May 30 where I'll be speaking with a fellow journalist whose name is so similar to mine, we are often mistaken for one another, Sonali Kohli!
P.S. Apologies for not being regular with these newsletters. I started out with high hopes of writing weekly and then quickly realized it only made sense to publish when I had something worth writing about. 😏