Saawan Duvvuri is a nationally recognized racial activist, non-profit leader, and policy researcher with a global impact on solving racial disparities world-wide. Saawan serves as the Founder and Executive Director of Literature Diversified, a youth-led non-profit organization working to solve global racial disparities in education. Literature Diversified fosters more inclusive classrooms for POC and LGBTQ+ students by developing original curricula that retells historical and literary lesson plans through the lenses of various marginalized groups, along with other educational resources for students and teachers alike ranging from pre-professional workshops to inclusivity webinars. Through Literature Diversified, Saawan leads a team of over 400 students across 22 global chapters, and Literature Diversified’s collection of over 450 educational resources across over 55 lesson plans, workshops, and research collections have been taught to over 12,700 students worldwide.
Furthermore, Saawan serves as the youngest researcher at Harvard University’s department of African-American Studies, where he began researching when he was just 15. At Harvard, Saawan researches racial disparities in policing, sentencing, and incarceration while focusing on the gaps in our legal system that cause different educational and justice outcomes between racial groups. Saawan also conducted research at UCLA’s department of Statistics when he was just 14, and his paper which analyzed public school educational disparities in the DFW Metroplex where he grew up was published in an international, peer-reviewed journal.
For his work in racial advocacy, Saawan has been named a Prudential Emerging Visionary ($5000 for Literature Diversified, 3.5% acceptance rate), an Ashoka Young Changemaker, a recipient of the Princeton Prize in Race Relations Certificate of Accomplishment, a NSLI-Y scholar, and a Taco Bell Ambition Accelerator Challenge Winner. Saawan has also been featured on the NBC Today Show by Hoda Kotb, Fox News, News Channel 5, and in Time Square.