Lifelines: The Literature of Women's Human Rights, Library of Congress, 2000

This event, held in collaboration with The African and Middle Eastern Division of The Library of Congress, will feature readings by leading women authors of the global women's movement. Reader-Authors include: Mahnaz Afkhami, Ama Ata Aidoo, Samar Attar, Carolyn Forché, and Grace Paley.

Literature can weave lifelines connecting the listener to testimonies that inspire and call for solidarity. Women’s voices resonate across divides to convey understanding and appreciation for the pain of exile, torture, violence and war, and the possibility of starting fresh, of healing, safety, and peace.

Author-Readers:

Ama Ata Aidoo, poet, playwright, novelist and short story writer is one of Africa's greatest women writers and a committed and outspoken campaigner for women's rights. Much of her writing describes the complex challenges faced by women in post-independent Ghanaian society and elsewhere in Africa. Some of her most important works include: The Dilemma of a Ghost, No Sweetness Here, Anowa, Our Sister Killjoy-or reflections from a black-eyed squint, The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories, Birds and Other Poems, Changes, An Angry Letter in January, The Girl Who Can and Other Stories (1999).

Mahnaz Afkhami has been a leading advocate of women's rights internationally for the last three decades. Prior to the Islamic revolution, she taught English Literature at the National University of Iran and founded the Association of Iranian University Women. In 1976 she was appointed Minister of State for Women's Affairs. Today she lives in exile in the United States where she is Founder and President of the Women's Learning Partnership. Among her publications are Women and the Law in Iran, In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Postrevolutionary Iran, Women in Exile, Faith & Freedom: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World, Claiming Our Rights: A Manual for Women's Human Rights Education in Muslim Societies, and Muslim Women and the Politics of Participation: Implementing the Beijing Platform.

Syrian writer Samar Attar's lyrical poetry has been anthologized in Canada, the United States, and England. Her poems appear in in Volvox: Poetry from the Unofficial Languages of Canada,The Penguin Book of Women Poets, and Women of the Fertile Crescent. Her novels, literary criticism, and other works have been published in both Arabic and English. Among them are The Intruder in Modern Drama, The Arab European Encounter, Lina: A Portrait of a Damascene Girl (Arabic and English), and The House on Arnus Square (Arabic and English). She has also written a short play for radio about the struggles of Aborigines and migrants in Australia (Arabic and English).

Carolyn Forché's award winning verse has been described as "poetry of consummate beauty." Her first collection Gathering of the Tribes, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1976. In 1977, she traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegría. Her experiences as a human rights activist in El Salvador are documented in her second book, The Country Between Us, which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was chosen as the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets. She worked as a correspondent in Beirut, Lebanon for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and as a human rights liaison in South Africa. Among her publications are Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, The Angel of History, Involuntary Memory, and El Salvador: Works of Thirty Photographers. She teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Poetry at George Mason University in Virginia.

Grace Paley, human rights, anti-war, anti-nuclear activist, is the author of several highly acclaimed collections of short fictions including The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and Later the Same Day--as well as three collections of poetry, including Leaning Forward and Long Walks and Intimate Talks. Ms. Paley has taught at Columbia and Syracuse Universities, and at both City College of New York, and Sarah Lawrence College, where she taught creative writing and literature for 18 years. She is the recipient of numerous literary awards fellowships, including a Senior Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1987, in recognition of her lifetime contribution to literature.