Voice of Witness

Nowhere to Be Home assistant editor and U.S. Campaign for Burma Communications and Development Director, Thelma Young, will be featured discussing current developments in Burma on WBAI’s Asia Pacific Forum tonight. You can listen to Asia Pacific Forum at 9pm ET on WBAI 99.5 in New York City, or listen online here.

This month, California Northern Magazine features the narrative of Victoria Sanchez, from our latest title Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons.

About Victoria: In 1995, Victoria was arrested for a murder she was involved in three years earlier, when she was sixteen years old. Although she was a minor at the time of the murder, she was tried as an adult, and was subsequently sentenced to life without parole. Victoria talks about her painful separation from her four-month old son Ethan upon her arrest, and how she tried to cope with this in prison by adopting several of the cottontail rabbits that roam the prison grounds. “I raised one for three years, potty trained and all. I became its mom.” Victoria also describes her relationship with a member of staff, which resulted in an extension of six years on her sentence, and how she overcame her battle with heroin to become an advocate for juvenile offenders.

To read an excerpt from Victoria’s narrative, just click here.

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.

This week, the Latin America Working Group, a coalition of organizations dedicated to speaking out on foreign policy in Latin America, featured an excerpt from our forthcoming collection of oral histories No End In Sight: Narratives from Colombia’s Displaced. To read this excerpt, just click here.