Do the Work

A guide to understanding power and creating change.

by Megan Pillow and Roxane Gay
designed by Aurélia Durand

Challenge your biases and broaden your understanding of power and how we wield it with this essential guide.

Power is complex. But Do The Work is a guide to navigating those complexities. From ancient theories of power to contemporary examples, from cultural patterns to personal insights, this guide provides a foundation for examining hierarchies and inequalities and establishes a framework for understanding power and how it shapes our lives and communities.

Between these pages, theory, commentary, and analysis create an engaging, creative, and mindful reading experience. This guide features approachable overviews of complex topics, thought-provoking questions, evocative illustrations, pages for your reflections, and steps we can all take to reframe our relationship to power and reinvigorate our desire to empower the people around us.

Thanks to the work of writer and scholar Megan Pillow, educator and New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay, and New York Times bestselling illustrator Aurélia Durand, Do The Work is a must-read for a more just future—and a more equitable now.

Do The Work asks:

• What can we learn about power from history and from our current moment?
• Who are the powerful, and who are the people denied power?
• Where are our own sources of power?
• How do we recognize our mistakes and become more self-aware?
• What does it mean to reclaim our power and to build community?

Do The Work explains:

• How theorists from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt have shaped our understanding of power
• Why Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality is at the heart of power discussions
• What Laura Mulvey and Audre Lorde can teach us about power and gender
• How poverty, redlining, and The Voting Rights Act all illustrate power imbalances
• What the Stonewall Riots showed us about resistance and community
• How to train ourselves in collective thinking, and what it means to “choose the margins”

Paperback | 128 pages | Leaping Hare | 2024

Megan Pillow is an American writer, editor, and scholar. She is project manager for Roxane Gay and co-editor of The Audacity, an innovative, integrity-driven newsletter inclusive of diverse voices. She holds an MFA and a PhD. Her work has appeared, among other places, in Electric Literature, Guernica, Triquarterly, and Gay Magazine and was featured in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022.

Roxane Gay is an American writer, editor, professor and activist. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist, a collection of pioneering essays and memoir, Hunger. In April 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts. She is a leading contributor to The Guardian and The New York Times and has been featured on This American Life and NPR. She lectures at Purdue and Yale. Born in Nebraska to Haitian parents who moved to the US when they were 19 years old, Gay’s work deals with the analysis and deconstruction of feminist and racial issues through the lens of her personal experiences with race, gender identity, and sexuality. Her widely acclaimed writing has won multiple awards, and her voice continues to be one of the most important in contemporary conversations about race and gender.

Aurélia Durand is a French graphic artist. Her work, which includes the illustrations for the #1 New York Times bestseller This Book Is Anti-Racist, is a vivid celebration of diversity; she dedicates her artistic voice to matters involving representation. Aurélia represents Afro-descendants as joyful, proud, and empowered — a united community whose destinies are intertwined. These colorful personalities present the unified voice of a global community whose hopes, dreams, and desires envision an inclusive future for all. Her work has been featured in advertising campaigns, galleries, and editorial magazines; her clients include Nike, The New Yorker, Facebook, and more. Find her on Instagram: @4ur3lia