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.
Join editor Robin Levi and legendary human rights activist Angela Davis in conversation at the Hammer Museum
Event Details:
December 1st, 7:00 pm
10899 Wilshire, Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90024
Join Robin Levi, co-editor of Inside This Place, Not of It and Human Rights Director of Justice Now in conversation with activist Angela Davis. Davis’ recent work has focused on incarceration and the criminalization of communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. Her recent books are Abolition Democracy: Beyond Incarceration, Torture and Empire and Are Prisons Obsolete? For more information on this free event, 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.
In light of the immigration cr
ackdown in Alabama this fall, Susan Straight has written an article for the Los Angeles Times, Immigration: For the sake of the children, about the sacrifices made by parents to secure better futures for their children.
“This is what I learned in Mexico: that parents will make any sacrifice for their children. Why do so many come across the border illegally? If you told me that one of my daughters would die young after stepping on a nail in a village without a doctor, or that my girls would have to leave school because they were needed to work and support the family, or that they would be in danger every day from drug …
Our video The Words of Kyaw Zwar, made in collaboration with the Magnum Foundation, was featured today on Once magazine’s website. Once is a new iPad magazine that melds photography, journalism and media innovation. Join them in helping us share this video with your friends and communities.
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.”
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.
Inside This Place, Not of It editors Ayelet Waldman and Robin Levi addressed this issue today in an interview on KALW’s Crosscurrents. Levi said, “The story of incarceration, particularly of incarceration of women in this country, is an artifact of the war on drugs. When we decided to increase the penalties for drug use, for drug sale, so astronomically, we began pouring hundreds of thousands of people in the prison system. We now in this country incarcerate more people than any other country in the world, certainly more than any other western country.”
Read the full interview here.
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/
