Last week, after a chant of “send her back” broke out at a Trump rally in North Carolina, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar responded by posting some lines from the Maya Angelou poem Still, like air, I’ll rise on Twitter.

At this troubling moment in America, when vitriolic speech is dominating the conversation, the Guardian and PEN America reached out to high-profile writers and asked them to share inspiring lines from poems or literature about overcoming hatred and racism. Their submissions follow. We hope you, our readers, will add to this collection. You can submit ideas here and we will publish some of your suggestions:

Gregory Pardlo

Gregory Pardlo, an American poet whose book Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer prize for poetry, chose the first stanza of Negro Hero, a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks published in 1945. The subject of the poem was Dorie Miller, a mess attendant in the US navy at the start of the second world war.

“I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to save them.

However, I have heard that sometimes you have to deal

Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore

Or they will haul themselves and you to the trash and the fish beneath.

(When I think of this, I do not worry about a few

Chipped teeth.)

Pardlo also suggested the poem Won’t You Celebrate with Me, by Lucille Clifton which includes the line

“come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.”

Andrew Solomon

Andrew Solomon, a writer, activist and lecturer whose books include The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression which won the National Book Award, chose this line from Emma Lazarus’s letter collection Epistle to the Hebrews.

“Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”

Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee, the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, selected some lines from her book Pachinko.

Living every day in the

presence of those who

refuse to acknowledge

your humanity

takes great courage.

Mira Jacob

Mira Jacob, the author and illustrator of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations and the critically acclaimed novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, chose an excerpt from the poem Who Will Survive in America? or 2017: A Horror Film by the poet Ashley M Jones, from her book Dark//Thing.

All year, I have worked

against this feeling, this country, this raging wreck

from sea to shining sea. Do you know what it means

to wake each morning, to realize your own brown hands

aren’t enough to protect you, that the likelihood

of any given day being your last one on earth

is too high, that we are more likely

to find life on Mars than to ever actually fix that fatal likelihood,

that we will probably just continue

with our meaningless Starbucks orders, fill the house

with Nina Simone and call that “woke,” value furry, collared

creatures

over our own human kin? Sometimes, seems like they can smell

our otherness, seems like we sparkle with something fiery in the

sunlight,

but not even our spectacular, crystalline glitter makes it easier

for them to believe that we have any inalienable right to breathe.

Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar, a writer, journalist and Vassar professor said: “I came to the US from India in the late 80s. The poems I started writing after a few years in this country were accounts of encounters with immigration officials. I wrote a series, Poems for the INS – the acronym stands for Immigration and Naturalization Service, a name that changed, in 2003, when the agency was subsumed by the newly created Department of Homeland Security – offering vignettes that staged imaginary conversations between the narrator and the official at the visa counter in Delhi. It was writing as revenge, fantasy in the purest form: fantasy tethered to the hurt of the real. I return to those lines now when I hear Trump’s words. Go back? No. We are here because you were there.”

“You can’t trust them,” one officer says.
I’m prepared to bet he is from Brooklyn.
There is no response from the other one. He is not angry,
just sad that I now work in his country.
This quiet American has pasted a sheet with Hindi alphabets
on his left, on his right there is a proverb from Punjab.
“You just can’t trust them,” the first one repeats,
shaking his wrist to loosen his heavy watch.
The one sitting down now raises his weary eyes.
“Did you, the first time you went there,
intend to come back?”
“Wait a minute,” I say, “did you get a visa
when you first went to the moon? Fuck the moon,
tell me about Vietnam. Just how precise
were your plans there, you asshole?”

You

Add to this collection. Send us excerpts from poetry or literature that speak to overcoming racism and hatred.