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 and encouraging people—especially women—to speak up for themselves.
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 an historically 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 Feminist Classics. 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 every year and report on developments there for The Nation
and online for the political site Tomdispatch.com.

I am now working on a third book about the impact of war, this time on American soldiers, their families, their communities and all the rest of us. I am grateful
to have received generous support for this project from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where I held the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellowship in 2010-2011, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
My latest book War Is Not Over When It’s Over, records what some amazingly courageous women in conflict and post-conflict zones from the Congo to Burma to Iraq have to say about war and peace in their homes and in their countries. 
All the while, I kept traveling, often by ship, on foot, or on horseback. The articles and photographs I dispatched from 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 an eye for social justice.

Photo of Ann Jones by Irene Young
- Ann Jones