At its core, human rights is a field of storytelling. As advocates, journalists, teachers and artists, we attempt to construct comprehensible stories out of the incomprehensible atrocities we observe through our work and study. We write to make sense of the things we've seen, to weigh the costs of our commitments to human dignity, and to remember what difference, if any, we feel we have made.
On October 10, 2011, the Human Rights Program and the Creative Writing Program are hosting a day-long series of events featuring writers, scholars, advocates, and artists from around the world. The conference, My Letter to the World: Narrating Human Rights, will explore the links between literary work, specifically memoir and the first person voice, with human rights testimony, scholarship and field work.
