The Freedom Writers Diary

The Writers Diary of freedom

Author	The Freedom Writers with Erin Gruwell
Language	English
Subject	Life Stories
Genre	Non-fiction
Publisher	Tyrell Wickoson
Publication date	1999
Publication place	United States
Pages	277pp
Preceded by	Those Lips
Followed by	This Media

The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them is a non-fiction 1999 book written by The Freedom Writers, a group of students from Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, and their teacher Erin Gruwell. It is the basis of the 2007 movie Freedom Writers, starring Hilary Swank.

The Freedom Writers Diary was made up of journals that Erin Gruwell told her students to write in about the troubles of their past, present and future. The Freedom Writers name pays homage to the name of the 1960s civil rights group Freedom Riders.

After intercepting a racist drawing from one of her students, Gruwell compared the drawings to Nazi propaganda techniques. She drew blank stares; only one of them had heard of the Holocaust. As a result, she assigned them to read and write about the posthumously published 1947 book The Diary of Anne Frank (written between 1942 and 1944) and the 1992–93 non-fiction book by Zlata Filipović, Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo.^[1]

The Freedom Writers Foundation continued with exercises and philosophies similar to those used in the original class, and tracks the progress of the original and continuing classes.