ANN JONES
WRITER/PHOTOGRAPHER
I’ve always been an outraged activist for civil rights, women’s rights, and peace. And I have itchy feet.
So I’ve spent the better part of my life traveling in the U.S. and abroad, working as a writer, reporter, photographer, and humanitarian, and speaking up for people—especially women—who have trouble making their voices heard.
I grew up in Wisconsin, studied there and in Austria, and received my PhD in literature and history from the University of Wisconsin in 1970.
I took a job teaching English at a black college in the south; and when
I saw students shortchanged, I wrote my first book of advocacy, Uncle Tom’s Campus (1973). Later, as I continued intermittently to teach writing and organize women’s studies programs on other campuses,
I began what turned into a series of books about women and violence. The first was Women Who Kill (1980), recently reissued in a 30th anniversary edition by the Feminist Press as the first title in a series of Contemporary Classics of feminism. Everyday Death (1985) is the story of a battered woman who served a life sentence for killing her husband. When Love Goes Wrong (1992), written with my friend the late Susan Schechter, is a guide for women stuck in relationships with abusive control freaks. This series culminated with Next Time, She’ll Be Dead (1994, updated 2000).
After 9/11, I went to Afghanistan to work as a humanitarian volunteer off and on for four years, documenting the cases of women detained in prison,
lobbying for women’s rights, and teaching Afghan high school English teachers. I wrote about my experiences there in Kabul in Winter (2006),
a book that serves today as a good guide to what’s gone wrong. I still visit Afghanistan periodically and report on developments there for The Nation
and online for Tomdispatch.com.
In 2007-08, I worked in post-conflict countries with the International Rescue Committee on a special project of the Gender-Based Violence Unit,
encouraging women through photography to document their lives and speak up for change. That project and my independent research among Iraqi
refugees in the Middle East are described in my new book War Is Not Over When It’s Over to be published by Metropolitan Books in September.
My new book War Is Not Over When It’s Over, coming out in September, is my latest effort to record what women in conflict and post-conflict zones from the Congo to Burma to Iraq have to say about war and peace in the home and in the country. I hope you’ll want to read it.
All the while, I kept traveling, often by ship, on foot, or on horseback. The articles and photographs I dispatched from every continent and many remote corners of the world appeared in magazines and newspapers such as National Geographic Traveler, Outside, and the New York Times. In the late 1990s, I journeyed across Africa
in search of a rain-making queen and wrote Looking for Lovedu (2001), a travel adventure with a difference:
an eye for social justice.
Photo of Ann Jones by Irene Young
- Ann Jones
