{"id":137990374,"date":"2025-04-28T11:33:15","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T16:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/?p=137990374"},"modified":"2026-02-28T14:12:32","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T20:12:32","slug":"increase-diversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/increase-diversity\/","title":{"rendered":"Increase Diversity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Help Build a Garden of Wildwords and Inclusive Beauty<\/h2>\n

Celebrating the Banned & Challenged:<\/strong> First They Came for the Books...<\/p>\n

And I was not a book. Then, they went after the words. And I said, \"Hah! No you don't.<\/a>\"<\/p>\n

The list of banned words has grown as fast as the list of banned and challenged books. Those loud proponents of free speech<\/a> - the ones who vociferously accuse \"lefties\" and \"liberals\" of trying to take away their First Amendment rights<\/a>, simply because not everyone is interested in what they have to say, have done their level best to truly squelch free speech. But us \"educated elites\" (read: folks who can spell and decipher the big words in the US Constitution) have our own solutions - we will enshrine these words in poetry and share them with everyone who wants to read and listen. No, Tommy Tuberville, we poets are not destroying the military by reciting poems aircraft carriers and turning soldiers \"woke.\"<\/a> These dudes aren't exactly shrinking violets.<\/a> Roosevelt could've taken you, Tommy.<\/p>\n

You kind of have to laugh when the \"Enola Gay\" was flagged for removal from governmental websites<\/a> by the very people who wouldn't bat an eye at genocide, because it contains the word \"gay.\" But writers, it turns out, are unafraid of words. We just hone our nibs to a sharper edge - dip them in gall - and refuse to be silenced on the page.<\/p>\n

Join in, if you will - see how many of the following words you can work into a poem or a short story. The list has grown since I posted my first challenge to you all - Poetry from Banned Words.<\/a> Be as subtle, or as bitingly humorous, or as dark and angry as you want to be, while it is still your right to write.<\/p>\n

Nearly 200 Naughty Words to Get Your Writing Banned by the Feds<\/a> (a New York Times article - a gift from me to you).<\/p>\n

After you've written your own poem, you can submit it here: Winning Writers Submission Manager - Live and Let DEI Anthology (no fee)<\/a> (the deadline is Thursday, May 1, 2025 5:00 AM) or post your poem or short story link in a comment on my blog, if you would like to!<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":137990380,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_has_post_settings":[],"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,7],"tags":[2741],"hashtags":[],"class_list":["post-137990374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","category-writing","tag-a2z2025"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 08:15:15","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137990374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137990374"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137990374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137990834,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137990374\/revisions\/137990834"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137990380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137990374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137990374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137990374"},{"taxonomy":"hashtags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jahangiri.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtags?post=137990374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}