Poetry is an important part of my life. Off and on over the past ten years, I’ve served as the poetry editor at the national literary journal Many Mountains Moving, which has an ongoing mission of celebrating and publishing diverse voices from many cultures and backgrounds.
I spent the past week at the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference, where I and the other editors from our journal hosted a panel on sustainable aesthetics and diversity. After the panel, members of the audience lingered to discuss these topics in greater depth, including the definition of diversity.
While the easy definition includes culture, religion, ethnicity, and geographic location, there’s a bigger definition”one that involves a point of view and open-mindedness that transcends all of these other factors. It has to do with a willingness to both transcend and embrace all of the things that make us different from one another, settling somewhere in that amazing space that holds us all as people, sharing the same planet, however beautifully and uniquely different we are. That’s the holistic definition of diversity, and one that could help direct the world toward peaceful resolutions, and erase the fears that give rise to violence and anger over religious differences, skin color, and language. And who, really, couldn’t use a little healing?
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