U of M conference to address human rights writing

What: Conference on narrative writing and human rights
Who: Emin Milli, James Dawes, Annette Kobak, and Vesna Goldsworthy
When: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday, Oct. 10

MINNEAPOLIS/ ST. PAUL (9/29/2011)—The University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts’ Human Rights and Creative Writing programs will sponsor a daylong conference on writing about human rights issues on Monday, Oct. 10. The conference, My Letter to the World: Narrating Human Rights, is intended to bring writers, literary scholars and human rights activists together to discuss how human rights issues are presented in first person narrative writing, including memoir, fiction and nonfiction.

The conference will feature many luminaries known for their narrative writing on a host of human rights issues; they include Azeri political blogger Emin Milli, memoirists Annette Kobak and Vesna Goldsworthy, novelist Nuruddin Farah, author James Dawes, and others.

The conference will take place at Coffman Memorial Union Theater, 300 Washington Avenue S.E., Minneapolis from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The capstone event will be the Department of English’s Esther Freier Endowed Lecture in Literature, featuring author and foreign correspondent Philip Gourevitch, author of "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families", whose talk is titled Salvage: Writing About Aftermaths from Rwanda to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. He speaks at 7:30 p.m.

Questions addressed by the conference will include: What are the ethics of writing about genocide‘ What is the writer’s responsibility in witnessing? And how do we talk about such writing in the classroom’

The support of narrative writing about human rights is an important initiative of and partnership between the Creative Writing and Human Rights programs. Their joint Scribes for Human Rights fellowship supports a creative writing graduate student who does intensive research and writing on a human rights issue during the fellowship.

“Narrative writing can illuminate human rights issues in a way that news reports simply can’t,” says Regents Professor of English and noted memoirist Patricia Hampl. “Most atrocities are not comprehensible until they are described by memoir or nonfiction prose—think Anne Frank or Adam Hochschild.”

"My Letter to the World: Narrating Human Rights" is free and open to the public.