Amplifying Unheard Voices: Voice of Witness Editors on Social Justice Storytelling 
What: Panel & Discussion
When: Sunday, June 5, 5:00 – 6:00 pm
Where: Dharma College in Berkeley, CA
In a climate where our news feeds are saturated with reports on the injustices occurring in our country and around the world, how can journalists and writers foster a deeper engagement with important issues that might seem abstract, distant, or simply too big to take on?Voice of Witness is a non-profit oral history book series and education program that amplifies the unheard voices of people most directly impacted by injustice. The editors on this panel come together to discuss their experiences using oral history to illuminate stories from inside women’s prisons, the West Bank and Gaza, and more.
Ayelet Waldman is the author of the novels
Love & Treasure,
Red Hook Road,
Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,
Daughter’s Keeper, and of the
New York Times bestselling essay collection,
Bad Mother. Her books have been translated throughout the world. She co-edited the Voice of Witness book
Inside This Place, Not Of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons. She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and four children.
Robin S. Levi is a women’s human rights consultant and co-editor of
Inside This Place, Not Of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons. A graduate of Stanford Law School, Robin has written and spoken extensively on women’s human rights in the U.S. and abroad. She has recently worked as an advisor to the ACLU of Northern California’s research into pregnancy care in California jails, and for a documentary on eugenics in U.S. women’s prisons. Until 2012, Robin was the founding Human Rights Director at Justice Now, which partners with people inside women’s prisons to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons.
Natalie Catasús is a poet, scholar, and oral historian. Her writing on Cuban and Cuban American culture has focused on geography, memorials, mass media, and the role of hybridity in narratives of exile and displacement. She has served as the managing editor of Eleven Eleven Journal of Literature and Art and currently oversees communications and outreach at Voice of Witness.
Visit the Bay Area Book Festival website for more information.
