Voice of Witness

In the last days of 2011, The Nation and The Christian Science Monitor featured articles by Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice editor Alia Malek concerning the issue of unlawful detention on U.S. soil.

In The Nation, Alia tells the story of Shukri Abu-Baker, imprisoned in the highly secretive Communication Management Unit (CMU) in Terre Haute, Indiana, with severe limits on communication with his family.  Click here to read the full article.

In The Christian Science Monitor, Malek denounces the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which authorizes the indefinite detention of American citizens suspected of terrorism. The Act was signed into law by President Obama on New Year’s Eve. Click here to read the full article.

Also in the news, Patriot Acts narrator Talat Hamdani was featured on the New York Times website on the first day of the year. In Patriot Acts, Talat tells the moving story of her son’s death in the collapse of the Twin Towers and the suspicion with which he was sought by the police in the following months. Click here to read Talat’s full narrative, excerpted on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency before the title was published.

For more information on Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice or to purchase the book, please visit the McSweeney’s website here.

Join Peter Orner, editor of Voice of Witness titles Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives and Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, in conversation with Peter Godwin, author of The Fear at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. Orner and Godwin will discuss their work, human rights in Zimbabwe, and the power of storytelling for social justice.

“Hope Deferred might be the most important publication to have come out of Zimbabwe in the past thirty years.” – Alexandra Fuller, Harper’s Magazine

“[The Fear is] a document that should be read by anyone interested in the sacrifices that people are willing to make for the sake of democracy.” – The New York Times

Event details:
Monday, February 13 at 7 pm
Jewish Community Center of San Francisco
3200 California St.
Members $17 | Public $20 | Student $10

For more information about the event, click here.

This week, the Bay State Banner featured a moving review of our latest title, Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives From Women’s Prisons, edited by Robin Levi and Ayelet Waldman and created in partnership with Justice Now.

The review included an interview with Robin Levi, who says, “I wanted people to see who these women are that we’re putting inside. When people see them and hear their voices, they’ll ask—are we safer because they’re inside? Are our communities safer? What are we solving  my doing this? These women deserve more from us and we deserve more as a community and as a society.”

Click here to read the full review.

This week, Inside This Place, Not of It editors Ayelet Waldman and Robin Levi published a powerful piece on the Daily Beast, exploring the realities behind life inside U.S. women’s prisons. “Shackles, sexual violence, humiliation.” they write, “Sounds like a medieval torture chamber, but it’s modern life for many women in prisons across America.” To read the full article, click here.

To order our latest title, Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons, click here.

This week, the Huffington Post featured a review of our latest title Inside This Place, Not of It, edited by Ayelet Waldman and Robin Levi and created in partnership with Justice Now.

In it, author Meg Waite Clayton writes:

“These narratives are incredibly compelling. To me, they are a reminder of how thin the line is between those of us who thrive and those of us who struggle, and how much our lives can be changed as a result of bad circumstances, bad choices, or bad luck.” Click here to read the full review.

Last weekend, Ayelet Waldman and Robin Levi, editors of Inside This Place, Not of It were interviewed by bestselling author Caroline Leavitt (Pictures of You) about the origins and process of creating this groundbreaking new book. They discuss the roadblocks to conducting interviews inside prisons, the perseverance and strength of the narrators, and more.

To see why Caroline called Inside This Place, Not of It, “nothing short of extraordinary”, click here.

This week, the Ms. Magazine blog featured a moving review of our latest title Inside This Place, Not of It, edited by Ayelet Waldman and Robin Levi and created in partnership with Justice Now. Read the review to learn about the book and why Ms. says of Voice of Witness: “This kind of publishing work is vital to record the lives of people who seldom have public platforms from which to tell their stories.”

Click here to read the review.

Watch this haunting video based on the experiences of Kyaw Zwar, a political prisoner whose story is featured in Nowhere to be Home. Using the images of acclaimed Chinese photographer Lu Nan and produced by Takaaki Okada, The Words of Kyaw Zwar is the result of a collaboration between Voice of Witness and the Magnum Foundation’s BE SEEN program. We thank the Panta Rhea Foundation for supporting this partnership.

To learn more about what you can do help the people of Burma, visit the website for the U.S. Campaign for Burma.

Earlier this month, Voice of Witness hosted ‘Voices from Burma,’ a reading event featuring Wallace Shawn, Kathryn Grody, Amitav Ghosh, Deborah Eisenberg and more. Hosted by the Asia Society’s Orville Schell, and presented in partnership with the Magnum Foundation, Open Society Foundations and the PEN American Center, the evening gave audiences a rare glimpse into life inside Burma. Listen to excerpts from the evening here.