Life Lines: The Literature of Women's Human Rights

WLP convenes a Human Rights Series entitled Life Lines: The Literature of Women's Human Rights. Life Lines are readings by leading women poets and writers from around the world.

Women's writing, poetry or prose, can weave life lines which connect the reader/listener to testimonies and to calls for solidarity and action. The literature of human rights makes the reader/listener a witness to events, conditions, and social realities that are at times painful, and at other times full of hope. Life Lines are designed to reveal, to record, and to rescue. They come in all lengths and design, they are culture specific, and they are universal. They are women's voices cast across divides to convey understanding and appreciation for the pain of exile, torture, violence and war, and the possibility of starting afresh, of healing, safety, and peace.

WLP mourns with great sorrow the passing of Reetika Vazirani (d. July 16, 2003), who shared her poetry with us last March at WLP's Life Lines event. Reetika was an Indian-born poet, raised in Maryland, whose work explored questions of home and the realities of exile in the context of globalization, travel, and immigration. She was the author of World Hotel (2002), which won the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and White Elephants (1996), for which she was awarded the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She was Writer-in-Residence at the College of William & Mary from 2002 to 2003 and was to join the faculty at Emory University this fall.