The program will be held on 26 August 2010 at 6:30 pm at The Gallery at Cedar Street Bridge. All are invited and admission is free. Refreshments will be served. Music will be provided by Holly McGarry, an accomplished Sandpoint singer/song writer. The Poetry Reading will feature several poets who contributed to the Anthology, along with select friends, reading their favorite poems from the human rights anthology published recently by Lost Horse Press of Sandpoint. $2 from the sale of each book goes to support the programs and activities of the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force.
Come hear great music and poetry, while learning about local activities and events being considered and under development by the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force and the Foundation for Human Rights Action & Advocacy! Discover how you can help to promote and to protect human rights in our community.
For additional info, please contact the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force at 263.0275.
From the Introduction of I GO TO THE RUINED PLACE: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights:
. . . WHEN WE MADE OUR CALL for submissions for an anthology of poems in defense of human rights, the allegations of torture were foremost in our minds. We knew people were outraged, saddened, profoundly moved and ashamed. But we also wanted to reach people who had suffered violations of their own rights from circumstances across the globe, or whose families had, or for whom preventing or healing these violations had become a life’s work. We drafted our call loosely: We are increasingly witness to torture, terrorisms and other violations of human rights at unprecedented degrees. What do our instincts tell us and what is our response to these violations? What is our vision of a future wherein human rights are not only respected but expanded?
What we received were both first hand accounts of violation—see prisoner Adrian English’s “Raped Man’s Stream of Consciousness,” or Farnoosh Moshiri’s poem recounting the terror of giving birth in Iran, or Li-Young Lee’s “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees”—and responses from people who feel struck personally by the blows enacted on others: To speak for, to speak as, and to speak against. We were surprised at the range of issues spoken to by the poets. While torture remained a critical topic, as well as issues at stake in the Iraq War, there were also poems that addressed immigrant rights, prisoners’ rights, the Holocaust, the wars in Cambodia , Vietnam , Serbia , South America, Palestine and Israel . We received poems that spoke of suicide bombing, violence against women, the aftermath of 9/11, and outlawing marriage for gay Americans.
We were also moved at the range of experience among the responders: homeless advocates, civil rights workers, clinical social workers, medics, the mentally ill, veterans, humanitarian aid workers, teachers, conscientious objectors, and, of course, many writers who work and fight daily for social justice in their communities. We are particularly proud of the number of Native American poets included in this anthology, something unusual in anthologies of this sort. It seemed to us impossible to collect a group of poems on human rights issues if we didn’t acknowledge the far reaching and often appalling violations that have taken place in our own country, upon the first citizens of this land who belong to five-hundred-sixty-two federally recognized tribes who function as sovereign nations. It is the acknowledgement of this history, among others, that will allow us to move forward as a country with a clearer conscience, extending our hand to other nations and other peoples who continue to endure neglect and abuse.
—melissa kwasny & m.l. smoker
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