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| Women's Voices Illuminating Cultures in Conflict |
 Journalist & Women's Rights Activist Thursday October 5, 2006 4:15 pm Seminar Campus Center 375 8:00 p.m. Reading Campus Center 375 |
 Iranian-American Author Tuesday October 17, 2006 4:15 pm Seminar Assembly Hall CC 8:00 p.m. Reading Recital Hall PAC |
 South Africa-Born Novelist Tuesday November 28, 2006 4:15 pm Seminar Assembly Hall CC 8:00 p.m. Reading Recital Hall PAC |
Ann Jones, journalist and authority on women and violence, is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (2006), a trenchant report about day-to-day life in a ruined, war-shattered city. As a volunteer aide worker in post-Taliban schools, prisons, and neighborhoods, Jones tells of her work with outcast and battered women, including war widows, runaway child brides, prostitutes, abandoned wives, and rape victims. She also addresses the failures of American intervention in the region.
"Jones, a keen observer, captures her surroundings in crisp vignettes, some appalling, others quite comic. . . . Kabul in Winter is a work of impassioned reportage, a sympathetic observer's damage assessment of a country torn apart. . . eloquent and persuasive. . . ." - New York TimesAn authority on women as victim and perpetrators of violence, Jones is the bestselling author of Looking for Lovedu: A Woman's Journey Through Africa (2001) and Women Who Kill (1980, 1996).
Nahid Rachlin is the most published Iranian author in the U.S. with four novels, a short story collection, and her new memoir, Persian Girls (Oct 2006).
praised the memoir for "shedding light on an intimate world that is at the center of the world's stage. With a deft hand, she writes of a life so honestly that it has all the facets of a great novel." - Patty Dann, authorBorn in Iran in 1944, Rachlin came to the U.S. to attend college in 1962 and stayed. Her fiction is based on her personal experiences and reveals the hidden Iran, the family dramas of ordinary Iranians as well as the politics underlying daily life. Rachin's previous work includes the novels, Jumping Over Fire (2006), The Heart's Desire (1995), Married to a Stranger (1983), Foreigner (1978), and the story collection Veils (1992).
"... a rare intimate look at Iranians who are poorer and less educated... I have read this book four times by now, and each time I have discovered new layers in it." - Ann Tyler, novelist, New York Times Book Review (on Foreigner)
Yvette Christians�, poet and fiction writer, was born in South Africa, and emigrated with her parents via Swaziland to Australia at the age of eighteen. Unconfessed (2006), her first novel, tells the epic story of Sila van den Kaap, a slave of 19th century South Africa. Inspired by actual court records, the novel follows Sila's struggle for survival as she is passed from master to master, farm to farm, and ultimately, from prison to prison.
"Christians� captures not only the breadth and complexity of Sila, a heroine for the ages, but also the moral crisis and political turmoil of 19th-century South Africa. . . . A gorgeous devastating song of freedom that will inevitably be compared to Toni Morrison's Beloved." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Christians� is also the author of Castaway (1999), a unique work of poetry that consists of fictional documents from the island of St. Helena, where Napoleon was banished, and where Christians�'s grandmother lived. Employing multiple personae, the book explores the history of the island, and its legacy as a place of exile and enslavement.
