Jeff Sharlet, the author of The Family, is hard at work adding the names of writers who have signed the statement "We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world."[1]  --  The New York Observer noted that the website is now publishing prose pieces and poems as well, and interviewed Francine Prose, one of the 956 (so far) signatories (including three U.S. poets laureate), who described her impressions of the movement.[2] ...

1.

[Website]

OCCUPY WRITERS

October 18, 2011

http://occupywriters.com/

Laurie Abraham, author of The Husbands and Wives Club
Lorraine Adams, author of Harbor
Pip Adam, author of Everything We Hoped For
Nancy Agabian, author of Me as Her Again
David Agranoff, author of The Vegan Revolution with Zombies
Rose Aguilar, author of Red Highways
Joe Ahearn, author of Five Fictions
Steve Ahlquist, author of The Oz Squad
Manan Ahmed, author of Where the Wild Frontiers Are
Elisa Albert, author of The Book of Dahlia
Malaika King Albrecht, author of Spill
Michelle Aldredge, editor of Gwarlingo
Alma Alexander, author of The Secrets of Jin Shei
Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
Steve Almond, author of Letters from People Who Hate Me
Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media?
Andrew Foster Altschul, author of Deus Ex Machina
Ivy Alvarez, author of Mortal
Natalie Angier, author of Woman
Nick Antosca, author of Fires
Joyce Appleby, author of The Relentless Revolution
Debby Applegate, author of The Most Famous Man in America
Katie Arnold-Ratliff, author of Bright Before Us
James Atlas, My Life in the Middle Ages
Shaun Attwood, author of Hard Time
Margaret Atwood, author The Handmaid’s Tale
Anne Aylor, author of The Double Happiness Company

[See the original link for the complete list of, as of Oct. 17, 2011, 910 signatories.]

2.

Occupy Wall Street

OCCUPY WRITERS NOW PUBLISHING WRITERS TOO
By Emily Witt

New York Observer
October 17, 2011

http://www.observer.com/2011/10/occupy-writers-now-publishing-writers-too/

Last week we reported on the launch of Occupy Writers, a web site where hundreds of writers, including Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Neil Gaiman, and Alice Walker, have declared their public support for Occupy Wall Street.  The site has expanded into literary content, having issued a call for participating writers to visit their local occupation and write about it: “a paragraph, a poem, a comic, a story, a vignette, anything goes.”  Two submissions have already been published, a short statement up today from the writer Francine Prose and a poem by D.A. Powell.

From Ms. Prose’s essay:  "I was struck by how well-organized everything was, and, despite the charge of 'vagueness' one keeps reading in the mainstream media, by the clarity -- clarity of purpose, clarity of intention, clarity of method, clarity of understanding of the most basic social and economic realities.  I kept thinking about how, since this movement started, I’ve been waking up in the morning without the dread (or at least without the total dread) with which I’ve woken every morning for so long, the vertiginous sense that we’re all falling off a cliff and no one (or almost no one) is saying anything about it."

We called Ms. Prose to ask about her involvement.  “Writing is actually what we do,” she said.  “It’s not as if our lives as writers haven’t been affected by corporate culture.”  As for publishing more work on the site, she said that “the more people say about it and the more effort that’s made to keep things vital and alive the better.”  She emphasized that Occupy Writers is not just about famous writers.  “One of the great things about Occupy Wall Street is their resistance to celebrity culture,” she said.