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World Conversations: |
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February 22, 2007, 7:00 pm
Location: Lagerquist Hall, Mary Baker Russell Center, Pacific Lutheran UniversityView video stream |
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Ann Jones has spent her life traveling the world and speaking up for people—especially women—whose voices are hard to hear. |
She grew up and went to school mostly in Wisconsin, receiving a Ph.D. in literature and history from the University of Wisconsin. At her first real job, teaching at a black college in the South, she found students getting shortchanged and wrote her first book of advocacy, Uncle Tom’s Campus (1973). An activist for civil rights, women’s rights, and peace, she followed with a series of books about women and violence beginning with Women Who Kill (1980) and culminating in Next Time, She’ll Be Dead (1994; updated edition, 2000).
She also worked at day jobs she loved, sometimes teaching writing and women’s studies as a university professor, and sometimes traveling as an international journalist and photographer. You may have seen her articles and photographs, dispatched from every continent and many remote areas of the world, in magazines and newspapers such as National Geographic Traveler, Outside, The Nation, or the New York Times. In the late 1990s, she journeyed across Africa in search of a rain-making queen and produced Looking for Lovedu (2001), a classic travel tale with a difference: an eye for social justice.
Trained to teach English as a foreign language, Ann Jones often worked as a volunteer among Spanish-speaking migrant farm workers in the United States. After 9/11 she went to Afghanistan, again as a volunteer, to teach Afghan high school English teachers and to work on behalf of women. She wrote about her experiences there in Kabul in Winter. A longtime New Yorker, she now lives in Northampton, Mass., with two old horses and two spotted cats.
Link to her Web site: http://www.annjonesonline.com
Link to World Conversations online: http://www.plu.edu/wangcenter/conversations