Wednesday 14 October, 5:30pm
Sofia Restaurant
Sacramento, CA
SPACE IS EXTREMELY LIMITED. Please RSVP by October 9 to:joshua@mark.merin.com / 916-443-6911
Underground America editor Peter Orner is the keynote speaker at the 2nd Annual Distinguished Lecturer Series, presented by the Sacramento County Bar Association. He will be speaking about his work as a human rights attorney, author and oral historian for the Voice of Witness series. For full event details, click here.
Voice of Witness narrator John Stoll has received a $5 million dollar settlement for his wrongful conviction in 1985. Stoll, a narrator from Voice of Witness’s first book, Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, is also the subject of the documentary Witch Hunt. Stoll was one of dozens of people arrested in Bakersfield, California for alleged participation in child molestation rings. He had served nineteen years of his forty year child molestation conviction before the Northern California Innocence Project tracked down enough witnesses to recant their earlier testimony. Four child witnesses testified during Stoll’s new trial that they had been forced by lawyers, prosecutors and social service workers to claim Stoll molested them. To read more about Stoll’s settlement, click here.
An interview with Out of Exile editor Craig Walzer is featured today in The Rumpus.
We need to be able to digest and give people who are very far away the time and space to tell their story in their own words, rather than these hygienic CNN clips of a mother crying and saying we need supplies, or, ‘They came and burned our village in the middle of the night and we had to run.’ It’s so much more important to humanize things like that.
To read the interview, click here.
Also featured is an excerpt from Out of Exile, I Just Want to See It Through, the story of Alweel Kol:
I was only ten years old, so I didn’t know anything about a war. One evening, armed men came to our village to catch certain people. They
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THE ART OF LISTENING: Oral Histories from Voice of Witness and StoryCorps
Thursday 17 September 2009, 7pm
Voice of Witness and StoryCorps will co-present an evening at the Contemporary Jewish Museum about the power of oral history to penetrate deeply into individual lives, as well as prompt social and political transformation. Out of Exile editor Craig Walzer will be in conversation with Melvin Reeves, StoryCorps Planner and former Manager, Family Support Services, American Red Cross September 11th Recovery Program. In addition, the evening will feature clips from the StoryCorps archive, as well as live interviews with featured Voice of Witness and StoryCorps participants from around the world. For more information, visit the Contemporary Jewish Museum website.
This event was made possible in part, by the California Arts Council.
Voice of Witness is a nonprofit book series that empowers those most closely affected by contemporary social injustice. Using oral history as a foundation, the series depicts human rights crises around the world through the stories of the men and women who experience them. Voice of Witness was founded by author Dave Eggers and physician/
