Diversity has always been a critically important factor in the success of the New Press, and it is all the more important now, when immigrants, religious minorities, ethnic and racial minorities, women, LGBTQ people, and other vulnerable communities are under attack across the nation.

Our belief in the importance of diversity has led us to graduate hundreds of diverse young people from our internship program, in an effort to help change the monochromatic nature of the publishing industry at large. Beyond the editorial department, it is our belief that having diverse staff across the institution, at all levels of management, including on the senior management team, brings the strength of diverse points of view to all aspects of our endeavor and ensures that no employee feels like either an outsider or a token.

Nearly 25 years ago, the New Press was conceived in part to challenge the orthodoxy that only some voices belong in the national conversation, and that only certain segments of the population are interested in reading, and buying, books. Since opening our doors, we have brought hundreds of “different” voices to the literary table, from an African-American federal prosecutor to an ex-felon; from a leader of the movement to treat home-care workers with dignity to a Sri Lankan novelist; from a Native American activist to the head of Lambda Legal Defense.

We showed with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over five years now, with close to a million copies sold, that there is an enormous audience for serious books that speak to the interests and concerns of what we have come to think of as intellectually redlined audiences. And we have found with the recent success of National Book Award–finalist Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land the importance of plumbing the difficult and uncomfortable realities—socioeconomic, racial, religious—at the root of the present political crisis.

Yet the New Press remains nearly alone as a truly diverse book publishing house (Lee & Low Books is a notable exception). We were featured by Publishers Weekly in 1992 as a model of diversity and singled out again 20 years later for the same accolade. Going into our 25th year, we have participated in a ridiculous number of panels and interviews about how to diversify a publishing house, as if there were some hidden tricks. But there are no secrets here. We have found that when we make diversity a key qualification for working at the New Press, the most diverse candidates often stand out as the most qualified.

We know something that Donald Trump doesn’t: that we will be stronger—and our books will be more powerful—if we invite and accommodate difference.

Just two days after the recent presidential election, 19-year-old Fariha Nizam, who wears a head scarf, was attacked on a Queens, New York, bus on her way to work as an intern at the New Press. As Gothamist reported the incident, a white, middle-aged couple approached her, yelling that she must take off her hijab. “The woman was doing most of the talking and she was basically telling me that I wasn’t allowed to wear it,” Fariha said. “She was telling me to take that disgusting piece of cloth off of my head, telling me it’s not allowed anymore.” Ultimately, Fariha said, the woman “started grabbing at my head and tried to pull it off.”

As a result, Fariha missed our editorial brainstorming session that morning about books the New Press should commission in response to the events of November 8. But she was certainly front of mind as our African-American, Latino, Asian, Indian, Haitian, gay, lesbian, Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and atheist members of the New Press staff sat together talking about the election. Together we came up with a dozen compelling book ideas that may help the country understand what’s been happening in our nation and what is likely to happen here and in the world going forward.

As everyone at the New Press knows firsthand, those ideas would not have taken the same shape or had the same robustness had they been developed in a room full of like-minded, homogeneous editors. The collective range of knowledge and breadth of reference available in a room full of diverse and discordant voices far exceed the sum of its parts.

Diane Wachtell is the cofounder and executive director of the New Press, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2017.