Compojure has a function called str* that works like clojure.core/str but uses the names of symbols/keywords instead of their literal representation.

clojure.contrib.java-utils/as-str fulfills the same purpose, but only accepts a single argument.

as-str could be 100% compatible with str if it became variadic:

(defn as-str
  [& args]
  (apply str (map (fn [x] (if (instance? clojure.lang.Named x)
                            (name x) x))
                  args)))

user> (as-str "Hello, " :World)
"Hello, World"