Alumna takes passion for writing and uses it to help her community

St. Cloud State University alumna Jestine Ware ’15 is an editor and writer by trade. While she first made her mark writing children’s books that centered around historically underrepresented communities, she now also uses her skills to advocate for those in her own community.

She said her education and professional journey as a writer is “a winding path,” starting with her undergraduate degree and then earning a Master of Arts in English from SCSU. From grad school she went into children’s publishing, but Ware found the publishing house she worked out of in Los Angeles reminded her far too much of the movie “The Devil Wears Prada.”

“I found it wasn’t really feeding my need to help the Black and Brown community and to work with young people who are kind of struggling, so I ended up working as a volunteer grant writer — which was basically a full-time job — on top of doing magazine editing,” Ware said. “It became my life.”

She now works as director of development and communications for South Suburban Pads, an organization that works to “prevent and end homelessness in Chicago’s south suburban area by empowering homeless individuals to create a sustainable future through emergency shelter, affordable housing solutions and supportive services.”

“It’s a whole community effort to help alleviate and end homelessness in the south suburbs of Chicago, which actually has about 50 percent of Chicago’s homeless population in it. There’s not a lot of funding for the suburbs, because people think ‘suburbs,’ they think ‘rich,’ and that’s not the case. There’s not many resources for folks out here,” Ware said. “I’m really working to raise awareness, raise funds and support the development of an organization that’s doing really good work. I’m really enjoying it, and what I learned at SCSU, I’m actually using all the time, every day.”

She credits working in The Write Place during her time at SCSU as well as a number of her courses, professors and SCSU connections with many of the tools she uses in her job. Design elements, making things easier for viewers or readers, rhetoric for grant writing and using an “emotional toolkit” in writing to encourage donors to support the organization’s efforts are resources she first learned at St. Cloud State. She also uses a number of those skills in her writing and editing career that she maintains outside of her nonprofit work.

“I helped so many students who came through there, and I learned a lot about myself and my writing and it was kind of like doing writing therapy sessions with folks,” Ware said. “I really was passionate about working with students at the writing center and making sure that they would pass, and I got really invested in certain students who would just come back every time and request me specifically, who needed a lot of help, and it was really rewarding to see folks just be so shocked that they could graduate after not having done super well their first couple of years at the school.

“The skills I learned working at the writing center, working with students; I also use with editing clients, with authors, with people’s work that I read to try to help them create the best work that they can,” she continued.

Ware is still passionate about helping others, whether it’s through helping people find resources needed in their communities or making others feel included and accurately represented in creative media.

“I hope to bring awareness to issues that communities of color are facing. The publishers that reach out to me typically do so because they want me to write specifically from my experience. I’ve written lots of things about pride and about folks and their immigrant experiences, and just all different types of marginalized experiences and trying to represent them as best and with as much dignity as you can,” Ware said. “I hang out with youth who are experiencing homelessness and talk to them about what their stories are and I write the story up and I send it out to donors. I do the same thing when I’m writing about someone famous as I do when I’m writing about someone who’s not famous, in just approaching everyone with dignity and respect when you’re working on their story.”

Some highlights from her career in children’s literature so far have been “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Real-Life Tales of Black Girl Magic” and “Rebel Girls Celebrate Pride: 25 Tales of Self-Love and Community,” as well as a number of podcast scripts for longer versions of those books, among others. Ware also has two books of historical fiction in the works: one that flips time periods between the Woolworth’s counter sit-ins of the 1960s and the present with Black Lives Matter, and a story that follows a girl experiencing the ACT UP movement during the AIDS crisis and exploring her own path as an activist.

At times, Ware has had to fight for stories to be published or to receive credit and fair compensation in the publishing world.

“Negotiating for and advocating for yourself is really important in publishing — especially when you’re a person of color and your work is not being recognized,” she said. “When everyone is consuming media all the time, it can be hard to realize the value and the effort that it takes to create things. It’s not just an AI-generated thing.”

More often than not, Ware’s experiences both in the nonprofit sector as well as the publishing world cross over and mirror each other. It’s her hope that, through both of her career paths, more communities that historically haven’t had a voice will have their stories shared accurately and in a dignified way that will have a positive impact for generations to come.

“I can draw on my own experiences in my organizations that I was working in — Black Youth Project 100, Assata’s Daughters, now I’m kind of getting involved in another group that’s an offshoot of both of those that’s called South Side Nature Play that one of my friends from Assata’s Daughters started just to get Black and Brown kids outside and playing and in nature and in safe spaces together to play and hang out and just be in the natural world like we were dispersing seeds,” Ware said. “Both things, for me, are about supporting my community and making sure folks are safe and whole and well and that our stories are told accurately.”