Greetings, BIPOC community! If you want support writing a book, or if you have clients who want further support with book coaching, let's connect. I'm always happy to brainstorm ideas and help demystify the publishing industry to get more of our gorgeous, urgently needed stories out into the world.

I started coaching after the 2009 publication of my first book, Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents, which was called “incomparable” by Alice Walker (whut!) and “searingly honest” by the Washington Post. It won several awards so folks started asking me for help with their own writing projects.

During the pandemic, I pivoted my 1:1 client work into an online coaching and mentorship community. And wow, it’s been a phenomenal (phenoMinal?!) ride—from hiring my first team members ... to celebrating the successes of our 100+ authors ... to creating awesome organizational partnerships that subsidize social justice writers in our program.

The Unicorn Authors Club is a BIPOC-centered online membership program dedicated to helping writers complete books. We offer book coaching, community support, craft lessons, a robust curriculum, and co-writing sessions to help writers focus on urgently needed, gorgeous manuscripts. We work to liberate our writing process and our stories from white supremacy paradigms and develop strategies for writing through trauma. Our writers have secured literary agent representation, won prestigious writing prizes, and signed book deals based on work they did in the Club. 

In partnership with Narrative Initiative, and partially resourced by the Ford Foundation, we run the Changemaker Authors Cohort to support movement leaders, organizers, and full-time activists to complete books and submit book proposals.

Upcoming in 2024:

• We’ll co-organize the second Changemaker Authors Conference (March 8-9), orienting social justice writers to the process of writing and publishing books. 

• We’ll hold our second training for BIPOC coaches to work with writers through our Sanctuary Coach train-the-trainer workshop (April).

• We’ll launch a bilingual pilot program, supported by the California Wellness Foundation, to support California survivors of prison-industrial and immigration detention systems who are writing books. 

• We’ll co-sponsor the Writers Conference held by Hedgebrook Women Authoring Change, where I’m honored to serve on the board.

More about me: Minal Hajratwala (they/she) wrote the award-winning epic Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents, with a six-figure contract from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment (poetry); and the Moon Fiji travel guidebook. She edited Out! Stories from the New Queer India and co-founded a poetry publishing collective. She graduated from Stanford, was a fellow at Columbia, and was a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar in Mumbai.