Me, as I often felt being a small displaced person in the United States.

When I was small, I believed I that if I could not see someone, that person could not see me. Being invisible seemed to be a desirable state, one that kept me from getting into trouble. But somewhere along the line, I started to see that it also meant that no one was there to share my hopes and dreams. And my suffering. And that this was not only a problem for displaced people such as my family and me but also for anyone who was or had become disenfranchised.

Decades later, when I was Online Editor at Little Patuxent Review, I started thinking about how relevant that was to the theme of the Winter 2012 issue on Social Justice. I wrote the initial piece with Latvian-Egyptian-American novelist Pauls Toutonghi on our shared experience, then produced pieces on welfare recipients, foreign authors, our nation’s incarcerated, our elderly and our nation’s veterans with other authors with the goal of all featuring people who have helped make marginalized segments of our world more visible to mainstream America through poetry, prose and visual art.