Fiction writing enables a more accurate portrayal of trauma than mimesis or memoir, due to literature’s ability to reshape language and frame discourse metaphorically. With the flourishing of trauma studies for decades, and the rise of narrative medicine, employing literary texts to express, contextualize, and possibly treat traumatic memory is no longer a new idea. Recent neurological studies suggest that being able to understand “triggers,” and trace them back to horrors endured, may eliminate trauma’s widespread and misconstrued effects. Crime writers (past and present) excel in voicing the mechanisms of traumatic memory in their individual and social imbrications, and making these obvious to a large number of people. Socioliterary analysis of them may increase awareness and deepen knowledge in a world where traumatic memory is severely ignored or misunderstood. Novelists have consistently named the consequences of trauma, even when psychiatry (swayed by politics) has failed to. This panel will examine the connection between literature, trauma, and social justice/social change.from different angles.